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Tina Jane Lupton

(she/her/hers)

Fisher-Bennett Hall 225

Tina Lupton is interested in the history of reading and writing.  Her key questions are about who has access to these technologies, when and where they get used, and how that use shapes the way we understand the categories of work, leisure, and education. Reading and the Making of Time (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, shortlisted for the Louis Gottschalk Prize), asks these questions in relation to eighteenth-century novels, diaries and letters. Reading Novels During the Covid 19 Pandemic (Oxford University Press, 2022, British Society for Contemporary Literature Monograph Prize) asks similar questions of novel readers today.  This co-authored monograph came out of a collaborative, ethnographic research project run between Denmark and England in 2019.  

 

Lupton is also interested in format (digital vs analogue reading, codex, the audiobook, graffiti, text generated by LLM) and has written several articles about texts that engage with their own formats, systems, and readership. “Queer Times for the Straight Book” (Post45) explores the relationship between linear reading and non-linear narrative in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the theory of Michel Serres and “Immersing the network in time: from the where to the when of print reading” (ELH, 2016), describes texts that imagine for themselves a future in which they are read on Sundays.  Together with Jack Chen, she is currently editing a collection, Bad Reading, which expands this interest in technology and format.

 

Lupton has always worked comparatively across languages and cultures.  Her PhD (Rutgers, 2002) compared self-reflexivity in British, American and German texts.   More recently, she has been interested in Scandinavian literatures and cultures.  She has lived and worked in many different settings:  as Professor and Head of the School of Modern Languages at the University of Copenhagen, as Professor and Director of Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick, and as a Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany. She has held major Leverhulme and Carlberg Fellowships.   

 

Her current project, Paid Leaves: When Writing Doesn’t Work, has been funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, and is about the many times people have written in opposition to work: in nineteenth-century adult education classes, on eighteenth-century Sundays, in retirement.  The case studies included in this project extend from the eighteenth century to the present and are engaged closely with the arguments of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière, and Peter Weiss.  Lupton is also interested in writing as a practice and her more public facing thoughts about reading and living have appeared in pieces in Public BooksLARB,n+1TLS, and in Love and the Novel (Profile, 2022).

Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

"Women's Work in Context" Feminized Work and the Labour of Literature, Emily Hogg and Charlotte Fabricius (Eds) (2025)
"“Can Literature Survive an Age of Endless Work?”" Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fuer Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 97. (2023)
"Repeat" Further Reading, Matt Rubery and Leah Price (Eds.) (2020)

Courses Taught

fall 2025

ENGL 0774.301 How Should A Person Be?