This panel asks how attention to literacy pedagogy might reshape the study of literature. Panelists will explore how literacy pedagogies have historically shaped what counts as literature, interpretation, and aesthetic judgment, and how literacy itself might be understood as an ongoing, culturally embedded, and politically charged practice. By examining literacy across different temporal, geographic, and institutional contexts, the panel foregrounds ways in which reading practices are produced through educational systems, material conditions, and cultural contexts. It also considers how those practices, in turn, structure literary forms and modes of interpretation. Panelists will address questions such as: How have institutional and pedagogical frameworks determined what counts as “good” reading? How have definitions of literacy expanded beyond alphabetic decoding or neutral cultural transmission to include embodied, creative, or even emancipatory practices? And what might it mean to center literacy pedagogy as a method within literary studies today?
The rationale for this session emerges from a growing recognition within the field that critical attention to literacy is often siloed from mainstream literary study. Meanwhile, contemporary concerns about student reading practices—frequently framed in terms of “crisis” or “deficit”—have renewed urgency around questions of literacy in higher education. This panel brings these concerns together, arguing that attention to literacy pedagogy not only enriches literary scholarship but also reinvigorates our sense of the ethical and institutional importance of literary studies. The session engages and extends existing scholarship in the history of reading, histories of education and literacy, and critical pedagogy. It also contributes to recent interdisciplinary work that expands literacy beyond print culture, including studies of global and multilingual reading practices, embodiment and memory, and grassroots textual and multimedia production.
Presenters:
Professor Tonya Krouse (Northern Kentucky University) will begin by meditating on the purported literacy deficits of today's students, and present a paper entitled "Pedagogical Practices for a More Just Future: Emancipating Students and the Literature Classroom through Literacy Instruction Focused on Reading”. She seeks to redeem the university classroom as a site of critical, engaged reading, and equip her students with the tools of literary studies, which she understands as essential to life both within and beyond the university.
Elvin Meng (UChicago) will turn us to the history of literacy instruction in 17th century China, and reimagines the classroom as a site of resistance and compromise, in which children responded to and actively reshaped the cultural transmission imagined by the adults tasked with their educations. Meng's presentation will be titled "In Search of Sagely Spiration: Literacy and Literature in 17th Century China”
Professor Deidre Lynch (Harvard University) will draw from her experiences teaching an undergraduate English course on reading and literacy, in a presentation entitled "Owning, Loving, and Losing Books: Literacy Stories 1744/1803/2026). She will take us through 300 years of "literacy stories", beginning with the reception history of John Newberry's 18th century children's books, moving to Joseph Lancaster's articulation of the "self-monitorial system" of literacy acquisition, and culminating in a meditation on her students' own stories of entering the world of letters.
Marisol Fila (University of Michigan) will share her experiences offering zine making as a creative and critical expansion of what it means to do literary studies in the classroom. She'll present examples from her students' final projects in a course called "Zines and DIY Grassroots Editorial Practices in Latin America" which asks students both to engage with the archive of these movements and to produce their own creative/critical interpretations of this archive.
Panel Organizer and Chair:
Emily Gowen is a Lecturer and Assistant Director of Studies at Harvard University's History & Literature program, and an incoming Assistant Professor of English at The University of Notre Dame.
Together, these papers offer a global, transhistorical, and interdisciplinary account of literacy as a contested set of cultural and aesthetic practices. The panel brings together scholars at different career stages and from a range of institutional contexts, and incorporates diverse methodological and geographic perspectives. This range of voices will foster a rich and generative conversation about the mutually constitutive relationship between literacy pedagogy and literary study.
Presenters will each give 10-12 minute papers on their chosen topics, and we will leave generous time for a q&a style conversation.