Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Workshop

Name: Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Workshop
Start: 2026-02-18T16:30:00-05:00
End: 2026-02-18T18:00:00-05:00
Location: Private Location (register to display)

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Intensive workshop Humanities Skill-Building Teaching & Mentoring

Wed, Feb 18, 2026

4:30 PM – 6 PM EST (GMT-5)

Private Location (register to display)

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Promotional flyer with image of the speaker and event description. Flyer for Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century: A Workshop

Close reading is the foundational practice of the discipline of literary studies, and yet there's no broad agreement about how to define it. The lack of consensus about what close reading is does not mean that we don’t know how to close read, just that we don’t have vocabulary for what we’re doing when we close read. Close readings are like dances—graceful performances that look fluid, but nonetheless have steps that can be named. In Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, co-editors Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant divide the practice of close reading into five steps and coin terms for each. This workshop, drawn from the just-published book, shares that framework, which offers greater clarity to literary scholars of all levels, whether they are writing close readings themselves, teaching their own students to close read, or reading the close readings of other scholars.

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Speakers

Johanna Winant

Johanna Winant is an associate professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. She received her BA from Stanford University, her MPhil from Cambridge University, and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Johanna specializes in poetry and poetics, transnational modernism, and the intersection of literature and philosophy—or, described differently, she works on how literary experimentation does philosophical work. She is the author of Lyric Logic (forthcoming Columbia University Press), and the co-editor, with Dan Sinykin, of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press). In addition to these books, she has published a number of scholarly articles on literature by Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, James Joyce, and more, and edited or co-edited special issues of journals. She also co-edits a book series, Re/Verse, with Brian Glavey and Kamran Javadizadeh, published by Amherst College Press. Johanna also enjoys writing for non-scholarly audiences; her essays can be found in magazines including Slate and the Boston Review. At Reed, she teaches Humanities 110 and courses on poetry and poetics and modern literature.

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