R.E.A. Loeffen (Rona) MA

Rona Loeffen is a PhD candidate researching youth reading culture as part of the project 'Anatomy of the #bookish: Unraveling the Reading Life of Teenagers in an Evolving Mediascape.' Their work zooms in on how teenagers read in their free time, and on the role that literary institutions, algorithms, and fan culture play in shaping that reading life.

We're supposedly living in a 'postdigital', even 'postliterate' age: public discourse lets us believe that teenagers barely read print books anymore, let alone for pleasure. But what happens when you actually look at the ones who do? How do these book-loving teens find their books, their community, their sense of self as readers, in a world that keeps shifting under their feet? Using both theoretical and empirical approaches, drawing from literary studies, media studies, and digital humanities, this research keeps teenagers' own reading experiences as its starting point, aiming to offer a more nuanced understanding of reading culture in a changing media landscape.