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Events

Our ninth biennial conference took place in 2023 and featured Drs. Janet Staiger and Cedric Burrows as keynote speakers. For information about our previous conferences, visit the Conference page. For details about our panels at other conferences, see the Events page. Our next conference will take place in the fall of 2025 and the call for papers will be posted in the spring.

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Publications

“Growing Up in the House of Freud” by Gillian Silverman appeared in The New Yorker on July 15, 2023. The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, and Iconic Authorship by James Machor was published in 2023. Kelsey Squire’s Willa Cather: The Critical Conversation appeared in 2020. See more Publications by RSS members.

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Journal

Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is published by Penn State UP and promotes discussion among literature, culture and media scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in reception study, reader-response criticism and pedagogy, history of the book, audience and communication studies, and more. See Journal for submission.

The Reception Study Society

A few words about our non-profit organization.


The Reception Study Society (RSS) is a non-profit organization which seeks to promote informal and formal exchanges between scholars in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience, communication, and media studies, and any other studies engaging these primary areas.

Bringing together theorists, scholars, teachers, and students from all of these areas, this association will promote a much-needed cross-disciplinary dialogue among all areas of reception studies, advancing teaching as well as research.

Since 1985, scholarship in these areas has exploded, with important expansions of research and new theoretical, historical, and textual studies. Although associations such as SHARP (Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing) examine one or two of these areas, the advances and developments in specific fields have remained largely disconnected. The RSS is the only association to promote dialog and discussion among all the diverse areas and scholars of reception study.

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