Each reading group will consider a pair of landmark essays that have sought to change the way that reading happens across the humanities, social sciences and beyond. 

Starting with Sedgwick’s paradigm-shifting account of paranoid and reparative reading, and moving through Bruno Latour’s polemical argument that critique has been co-opted and run out of steam, we move, in Reading Group 2, to Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s conceptualisation of surface reading, and Heather Love’s claim for the virtues of description; articles which each, in their different but related ways, seek to challenge the received wisdom of the hermeneutics of suspicion and depth.

The fourth in the series of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Memorial Symposia, Reparative Reading at 21 returns to consider Sedgwick's seminal 1996 essay, 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paraonid You Probably Think This Essay is About You'. The symposium will feature short position papers from a number of speakers, followed by a round table discussion.

Confirmed speakers include: