The Reception Study Society promotes informal and formal exchanges between scholars in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception history, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies, and gender, race, ethnic, sexuality, postcolonial, religious, and other studies. Proposals for panels and papers in any of these areas are now welcome. Please submit proposals of 250 words or less, along with a one-page cv, to rss2015@ipfw.edu by May 8, 2015.

Plenary Speakers will be:

Paul Armstrong
Professor of English, Brown University
Plenary Talk Title: "How Historical is Reading? What Literary Studies Can Learn from Neuroscience (and Vice Versa)"
Armstrong's most recent book, How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in September 2013. He is currently working on a scholarly edition of Henry James's The Ivory Tower.

George B. Hutchinson
Newton C. Farr Professor of American Culture, Cornell University
Plenary Talk Title: "When Literature Mattered"
Hutchinson's publications include, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa, and Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850. He is currently writing a book on American literature and culture in the 1940s.

Jeffrey Sconce
Associate Professor of Radio/TV/Film, Northwestern University
Plenary Talk Title: "That Bronte Girl: Intermedial Fantasy and the Adolescent Paracosm"
Sconce's work focuses on media history and cultural theory. His upcoming book project looks at the history of psychosis and electronic media in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Reduced rate rooms will be available from the Holiday Inn adjacent to the IPFW campus (260-482-3800).

Selected conference papers will be solicited for possible publication in the RSS journal, Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, published by Penn State University Press. For information about the RSS, including membership information, past conferences, and the journal, please visit our website: http://receptionstudy.org/.