The Australian Reception Network (ARN) was founded in 2018 and relaunched in 2023.
It brings together scholars from a range of fields including: literary, media, cultural, and fan studies; book history and media archaeology; publishing and editing studies; sociology of literature; Indigenous, Black, postcolonial/decolonial studies and critical race theory; feminist, queer and trans studies; mediaeval and ancient world studies.
What we have in common is an interest in what people do with texts, and what texts do to people.
We study how people make sense of, and make use of, texts; how the past is invoked and reconstructed in the present; how power stratifies and structures interpretations and evaluations of texts; how different technologies, from oral storytelling to AI-produced text, alter our lifeworlds and our reading practices. Through a range of approaches and methodologies, we study the practices of historical and contemporary readers; we trace the afterlives of texts; we trumpet the creativity and resistance of their interpreters, translators, rewriters and adaptors. And we critically map the historical, material, cultural, social, and ideological factors which make some texts available, and lend authority to some interpretations, while others are marginalised or lost to history.
Australian Reception Network 