Beyond the Book: Mass Reading Events and Contemporary Cultures of Reading in the UK, USA and Canada is a project directed from the Department of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, and funded primarily by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK). Mass reading events encourage people of the same city, region or nation-state to read the same book through programs of themed activities and the mass media.

Beyond the Book is a collaborative, interdisciplinary, transnational study across the UK, the US and Canada which investigates selected mass reading events using methodologies drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities. Our main objectives are to determine why and how people come together to share reading through a comparative study of selected mass reading events such as “Canada Reads,” “Richard and Judy’s Book Club,” and “One Book, One Community” programmes, including, but not limited to, “One Book, One Chicago” and “Liverpool Reads.” We also ask: do these events attract marginalised communities, foster new reading practices, enable social change? Our research aims to address a significant knowledge-gap about present-day readers and reading practices, the formation of reading communities, and the popular function of literary fiction.

We invite anyone with an interest in reading, readers, contemporary literary fiction and popular culture, cultural industries and creative communities to visit our website: www.beyondthebookproject.org

A conference on reading and readers will be held in Birmingham in September 2007. Keep in contact with us by emailing your own interests to: beyondthebook@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

Director: Danielle Fuller, American and Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham D.Fuller@bham.ac.uk
Co-Director: DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada denel.rehbergsedo@msvu.ca