RSS is hosting a colloquium on June 5, 2025 titled “Women, Taste, and the Politics of Reading in Twentieth Century America” that will feature Drs. Amy Blair, Mary Unger, and Yung-Hsing Wu. For further details, visit out Events page. We are also organizing panels at other conferences and we will be planning the next RSS conference for 2027.

For updates about our organization and upcoming conferences, please consider creating a free RSS account. If you pay the RSS membership, you will also receive our annual journal published by Penn State University Press.

2023 RSS Conference (New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM)

Our 2023 conference theme was “Diverse Audiences, Diverse Receptions” and it examined how the study of audience has been influenced by the rise of media/pop culture studies and the increased audience-creator interactions/tensions on social media. Presentations have also focused on book bans/laws, the economics of publishing/adaptations/marketing and other aspects of reception study in literature, film, and culture. The keynote speakers were Dr. Janet Staiger (Emeritus Professor, UT Austin) and Dr. Cedric Burrows (Associate Professor, Arizona SU). See the program below.

(Our 2021 conference was canceled due to the pandemic.)

2019 RSS Conference (Brigham Young University, Provo, UT)

Our 2019 conference theme was “Reception/Politics” and the keynote speakers were Dr. Racquel Gates, Associate Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY (Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, Duke UP, 2018) and Dr. Greg Barnhisel, Professor and Chair of English at Dusquesne University (Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy). See the program below.

2017 RSS Conference (St. Catherine University, Saint Paul, MN)

The theme was “Feminist Reception: Celebrating Thirty Years” in commemoration of the Women’s March on Washington and the publication of Gender and Reading anthology by Beth Flynn and Patsy Schweickart. The keynote speakers were: Paula Rabinowitz, University of Minnesota (“Scenes of Women Reading/Scenes of Reading Women: The paperback revolution and feminist consciousness”); Sumana Chattopadhyay, Marquette University (“Understanding Voters in a mediated world: Authoritarianism, Trust, Cynicism and Political Interest in Election 2016”); and Patsy Schweickart, Purdue University (“Reading Gender in the Interstices of Theory”). See the program below.