Readers and Reading Masterclass

Presented by The Australian Studies Centre,
University of Queensland
28-29 October 2006

Session leaders include:
Professor Clare Bradford, Deakin University
Associate Professor Patrick Buckridge, Griffith University
Dr Tim Dolin, Curtin University of Technology
Dr Alison Ravenscroft, La Trobe University

Implied Readers, Ideal Readers, Child Readers, Adolescent Readers, Gendered Readers, Racialised Readers, Serious Readers, Escapist Readers, Middlebrow Readers, Resistant Readers, Professional Readers, Performative Readers. The study of readers and reading practices is one of the most significant, emerging fields across a number of areas of literature, book history and print culture studies. It shifts the focus of enquiry from textual production to the dissemination and consumption of texts, across different historical periods and social contexts determined by class, ethnicity, gender, and geo-politics (eg colonisation). What did readers read, how did they read, and who read, when and where? This two day intensive masterclass, the fifth in the Australian Studies Centre’s annual series, will engage with the ideas that have informed our understanding of readers and reading in the past and present.

The ‘Readers and Reading ’ masterclass is aimed at postgraduates and early career researchers. Each of the event’s invited speakers will present a discussion paper based on their research and conduct a workshop to facilitate discussion on each participant’s research program. It is hoped that the masterclass will not only provide an opportunity for participants to receive advanced study on issues surrounding readers and reading, but that this event will provide an opportunity for postgraduates and early career researchers to establish research networks for the future.

Participants are expected to contribute actively to the masterclass by relating their current research or broader research program to the ideas and methods discussed. A book of readings will be distributed prior to the class.

WHERE: Clare Foley Room, Duchense College , University of Queensland , St Lucia

Convenor: Dr Roger Osborne, ph (07) 334 69804 or email r.osborne@uq.edu.au

For further information contact: Marilyn Barton , ph (07) 33651369 or email m.barton@uq.edu.au

THE SPEAKERS

Patrick Buckridge has published widely on the history of reading, with a particular focus on reading the classics, and on reading-advice books. He has published on Australian book culture, contemporary reading habits, private libraries, and 'appreciative' reading in Australian schools, is currently completing Australia Reads the Classics, a history of the reading of 'serious reading' in Australia, 1880-1960, and is starting in on a history of the publishing firm of Harrap as a vehicle for disseminating literary appreciation in the first half of last century.

Clare Bradford is Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne , Australia , where she teaches literary studies and children's literature and supervises students undertaking MA and PhD programmes. She has published widely on children’s literature in Children’s Literature in Education, Children’s Literature, Lion and Unicorn, Bookbird and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. Her book Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (Melbourne University Press, 2001), won the Children’s Literature Association Book Award and the IRSCL Award in 2003; her most recent book is Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature, a comparative study of settler society literatures for children which is to be published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2006. Her main research interests are in Australian children's literature, picture books, and colonial and postcolonial literatures for children. She is the editor of the journal Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature. With colleagues from Deakin and elsewhere she has won ARC Discovery Grants on utopian and dystopian tropes in children’s literature, and on multiculturalism and Australian children’s literature.

Tim Dolin is a Research Fellow in the Australia Research Institute at Curtin University of Technology in Perth , WA . He is the author of Hardy (2006: forthcoming) and George Eliot (2005), and is investigating the influence of mass-market popular fiction in Australia between 1888 and 1914, and the significance of the Victorian novel in colonial Australia .