Directory of Research and Expertise

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Culture, English Literature, History of the book, Philosophy

Summary of research interests and expertise:

I am a scholar of contemporary literature, focusing primarily on the novel, time use, and reading. My research is situated at the intersections of sociology, narrative studies, and literary theory. In 2020, colleagues from the University of Copenhagen and I were awarded funding from the Carlsberg Foundation for the Lockdown Reading Project, which led to the monograph Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (OUP, 2022. Awarded the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize). In 2022, I was awarded funding from the Council for the Defence of British Universities for a pilot project investigating the interconnected issues of when and why reading happens in the humanities. 

Project summary relevant to Fellowship:

The main focus of my research during my time at IES will be to develop my research on university reading practices,investigating the roles reading plays in different disciplines, their knowledge claims, and their outreach in the twenty-first century. What would it mean, for instance, to think about Philosophy or History as a style of reading rather than as disciplines with their own object of study? 

The rationale for my research is to see when, how, and why academics and students read. In documenting the realities of reading time and practices in today’s university, I will provide specific findings about the current conditions under which students and academics read. Having already undertaken preliminary research on reading practices in English Literature, History, and Philosophy, I am now expanding the study to consider the kinds of reading particular to disciplines such as Biology and Computer Science. My research will analyse the ways in which reading at university has changed and been perceived as something that can be gleaned from historical student diaries, syllabi, and literary forms such as the campus novel, journalism and university marketing materials. I also analyse how recent advances in AI are affecting how scholars and students read, and how such developments may change the nature of reading at university – in relation to research, teaching, and study. 

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
06-Jul-2023	When your job is to read after work Articles Davies, B., & Lupton, C. (2023). When your job is to read after work. Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, 15, 51-57.
01-Jun-2023	Crisis Time and Rereading Chapters Davies, B., Lupton, C., & Gormsen Schmidt, J. (2023). Crisis time and rereading. In S. Baumbach, & B. Neumann (Eds.), Temporalities in/of Crises in Anglophone Literatures (1st ed., pp. 194-209). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003348122-12, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003348122
17-Nov-2022	Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022) Monographs Davies, B., Lupton, C., & Gormsen Schmidt, J. (2022). Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic. (1st ed.) Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/reading-novels-during-the-covid-19-pandemic-9780192857682
01-Oct-2020	The darkness-within-the-light of contemporary fiction: Agamben’s missing reader and Ben Lerner’s 10:04 Articles Davies, B. (2020). The darkness-within-the-light of contemporary fiction: Agamben’s missing reader and Ben Lerner’s 10:04. Textual Practice, 34(10), 1729-1749. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2019.1627404

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