About Us

Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, USA and Canada is a three-year interdisciplinary research project funded primarily by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), 2005-8.

Our main objectives are to determine why and how people come together to share reading through a comparative study of selected mass reading events such as “Canada Reads,” “Richard and Judy’s Book Club,” and “One Book, One Community” programmes, including, but not limited to, “One Book, One Chicago” and “Liverpool Reads.” 

The mass reading event is a new, proliferating literary phenomenon. Events typically focus on a work of literary fiction and employ the mass media as a means of promoting participation in the themed activities and discussions that take place around the selected book.  Beyond the Book uses research methodologies drawn from both the humanities and social sciences to investigate whether mass reading events attract new readers and marginalized communities.  We also wish to determine whether this contemporary version of shared reading fosters new reading practices and even whether it is capable of initiating social change.

Our research will result in a trans-national analysis of contemporary shared reading practices, the formation of reading communities and the popular function of literary fiction in the UK, USA and Canada.  In addition to addressing a significant knowledge-gap in literary and cultural studies’ scholarship, we aim to produce practical guidelines of relevance to event organizers, book groups and cultural policy makers.

Beyond the Book is a collaborative project.  Directed from the Department of American & Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham, UK by literary scholar-cum-qualitative research expert and table-maker extraordinaire Danielle Fuller, our fieldwork guru and North American director is DeNel Rehberg Sedo (Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada). 

Anouk Lang was the project's Postdoctoral Fellow, while Anna Burrells provided us with part-time administrative assistance.  Translation into and from Spanish and French, the two most widely-spoken second languages in the USA and Canada, was ably provided by Aiora Irizar, Dominique Belkadi, Annie Rigler and Claire Wood. 

Fieldwork assistants: LaDonna Saunders (Chicago); Amy Laurent (Bristol); Cathy Collett, Kimberly Walsh, Lesley Mulcahy (Halifax); Lori Thiessen (Vancouver); Sara Beadle and Anna Burrells (Birmingham); Claire Brown and Ross Cohen (Liverpool); Diana LaChance (Huntsville); Felice Atesoglu and Mitogo Ayekaba (Seattle)

Transcribers: Brett Birks, Bronagh Clarke, Rich Langley, Mike  Dunn (UK); Hanni Bouma, Tricia Smith, Amelia Chester (Canada).

Stats consultant: Lindsay Engel.

Conference assistants: Cristina Ivanovici, Olivia Chambers, Ann Bower

Beyond the Book  was supported by an Advisory Board consisting of three senior scholars: Professor R.J. Ellis, Dr Ann McDermott (both University of Birmingham,UK) and Professor Jenny Hartley (Roehampton University, UK).

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