The ACM and Chicago’s Newberry Library will offer a seminar on research in the humanities, titled “One for the Books: Pleasures and Politics of Reading,” during the fall 2019 semester.
Learn more and apply to ‘One for the Books’ at the Newberry Library in Chicago (Deadline is March 15)
Students enrolled in the Seminar will investigate how, from Gutenberg to digital media, reading has offered a means of defining self, encountering others, drawing lines of inclusion and exclusion, and imagining change.
Readings and classroom discussions on the interdisciplinary study of reading itself will serve as a launch pad for participants to complete their own independent study using the Newberry’s research materials relating to the civilizations of Europe and the Americas.
Through a variety of lenses and sources, the 14-week seminar will probe the ways that reading empowers people to make sense of their work, and, sometimes, to transform it. Guest speakers from area universities will bring expertise on the history and neurology of reading, offering new approaches to the social and physical work that readers inhabit.
Leading the seminar will be Ralph Savarese, professor of English, and Elizabeth Prevost, professor of history, both of Grinnell College. They will focus the seminar on readers on the margins of society.
Prevost has researched Agatha Christie, seeking to understand how British Empire readers turned her from a provincial mystery writer into a global celebrity. Savarese became interested in marginalized readers after completing a book last year about reading literary fiction with autistic people across the spectrum (See It Feelingly: Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor).
