Keynote and Plenary Speakers

Our two keynote speakers are Janice Radway and Elizabeth Long.

You can download our conference poster using the link to the right.

Janice Radway, Duke University

Janice Radway has graciously agreed to be a keynote speaker at the conference.  The 'Beyond the Book' team are thrilled because her work on romance readers and the Book-of-the-Month club has greatly inspired our own project.  Given that the UK home of BTB is situated in a Department of American & Canadian Studies, Prof. Radway,a former President of the American Studies Association, is an ideal keynote for the conference. 

Janice Radway is Frances Fox Professor in Humanities (Department of Literature) and Professor of Literature at Duke University, USA. Her books include: Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.  London: Verso Press, 1987, and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle Class Desire.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997.  Most recently she has published articles on the future of American Studies (American Quarterly 51, 1999; & in The Futures of American Studies, Ed by Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, Duke U P, 2003) and the middle-brow authority of academic writing and publishing (Critical Inquiry 14.1, 2004 ), as well as a piece on girls' reading in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations. Ed by Timothy Brock et al. LEA P, 2002.

Elizabeth Long, Rice University

We are delighted that Elizabeth Long has agreed to participate in the conference as a keynote speaker.  Her most recent book, the product of over ten years of ethnographic work and analysis, will be known to many people reading this page: Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. U of Chicago Press, 2003.  She is also the editor of From Sociology to Cultural Studies:New Perspectives.

Elizabeth Long is Chair of the Department of Sociology at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  Professor Long's involvement with the sociology of culture, with the study of women and gender, qualitative research methods and social theory continues into her current projects.  These current investigations include a study of the variety of women's activism in the late 20th- and early-21st centuries.