Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age

Where: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 3222 Angell Hall

9:30-10:00: Coffee and Refreshments
10-12:00: Panel on New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age
2:00-4:00: Forum on New Institutions for the Digital Age

At the current moment of ever-accelerating technological change, it’s particularly important to pause and think about the challenges generated by new media and how they might or might not change the ways we read in the decades to come. What new literacies are generated in the digital era? What happens to the cultural practices and norms associated with and generated by the traditional book? And most importantly, how are institutions—libraries, bookstores, newspapers and magazines, presses, universities, the general reading public—responding to this new situation? How ought they respond?

MQR and Rackham are co-sponsoring this first in what we hope will be a series of open discussions devoted to thinking through these questions. A morning session will be devoted to theory and history; an afternoon session, to questions of institutional response. Symposium speakers will include University Librarian Paul Courant, Alan Liu (English Department, UC Santa Barbara, Director of Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Cultural and Social Practices of Online Reading ), Phil Pochoda (Director, U of Michigan Press), Jessica Pressman (English Department, Yale), Leah Price (English Department, Harvard University), Sam Tanenhaus (editor, New York Times Book Review).

Admission is free and open to the public. More Information.