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The Sixth Annual J. R. de J. Jackson Lecture: Lisa Gitelman (New York University), “On Not Reading”

Thursday, September 28, 2017 @ 4:15 PM - 6:00 PM

In association with the Faculty of Information and the Department of English

Reading is said to be “at risk” in the 21st Century, presumably because of the digitally mediated environment amid which we browse, multitask, and, well, read. Predictions of doom follow from the decline of reading, although there’s very little consensus about what reading is, what its particular virtues are, or how best to find out. This talk won’t solve these problems. Instead it seeks to sketch the present cultural location and extent of reading. How do we—if we can hypothesize a “we”—encounter reading? More particularly how do we encounter reading in profile or in silhouette, picked out against a backdrop of not reading?

Lisa Gitelman, Professor of English and of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and was published by Duke in 2014. Before that, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught at the Catholic University of American and at Harvard University, and has held fellowships and awards from the American Antiquarian Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers University, the Leslie Center Humanities Institute, Dartmouth College, and the University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Study.

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Details

Date:
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Time:
4:15 PM - 6:00 PM
Event Category:

Venue

Faculty of Information (Room 728)
140 St. George Street
Toronto, M5S 3G6
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Organizer

Toronto Centre for the Book