Reading as social practice The Beyond the Book research project

Beyond the Book (BTB) is a trans-Atlantic collaborative interdisciplinary research project that analyses mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, the USA and Canada. This article gives an overview of the origins, aims, scope and methods of the project. Beyond the Book (BTB) is a trans-Atlantic collaborative interdisciplinary research project that analyses mass reading events and the contemporary mean-ings of reading in the UK, the USA and Canada. The project was conceived in late 2002 and designed in mid-2003 by myself, a British North American Stud-ies scholar with a humanities training in literary studies, based in the Depart-ment of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Birmingham, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo, an American who works at Mount Saint Vincent Univer-sity in Canada as a communications scholar and who trained as a social scien-tist.1 In autumn 2005, thanks to a research grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the BTB team expanded and we were joined by Dr Anouk Lang, who has a literary studies training and a particular interest in Canadian and Australian modernist literary culture, working as a full-time postdoctor-al fellow. At the same time, Anna Burrells, who is completing a PhD in th