Beyond the Book: Contemporary Cultures of Reading Conference 31 August - 2 September 2007

Welcome to our conference webpages.

Keynotes: Janice Radway (Duke University); Elizabeth Long (Rice University)

August 31-2 September saw one of the major events for the Beyond the Book project: our conference on Contemporary Cultures of Reading which ended our second project year. Over 120 scholars and practitioners from a range of countries descended on the University of Birmingham, representing a cross-section of disciplines including English literature, sociology, education, African-American studies, linguistics, performance studies, criminology, library science, publishing studies and cultural studies. Over three days, the topics covered ranged from the circulation of urban fiction among women in US prisons to the effect of blogging on the dissemination of poetry, and from projects using reading to assist in recuperation from brain surgery to online Chinese time-travel romances.

Various publications are planned from the conference: an edited volume is already well under way.  

We are really excited to be working with a number of journals to publish some of the great work that came out of the Conference:

New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship

Edited by Sally Maynard

Particip@tions (online journal of audience and reception research)

Edited by Martin Barker

Popular Narrative Media

Edited by Nickianne Moody & Joanne Knowles

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies - Debates Section

Edited by Julia Knight & Alexis Weedon

We look forward to some very exciting special issues.

Delegates from the conference should have been emailed on 7th March with a combined CFP menu, if you were a delegate at the conference and didn't receive the email please get in touch with Anna  at: burrealz@adf.bham.ac.uk