Donna Harrington-Lueker, Ph.D.
Donna Harrington-Lueker, Ph.D.
Professor | English, Communications, and Media
A former magazine writer and editor, Donna Harrington-Lueker is a specialist in print culture and book history. Her research interests include 19th century print culture, the radical or alternative press; women and the media; and global media systems. Her work has appeared in Book History, 19th Century Studies, Journalism History, and the Keats-Shelley Journal. She is the author of Books for Idle Hours: 19th-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading.
Dr. Harrington-Lueker received her bachelor’s degree from Merrimack College in North Andover, M.A., and her master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. She has worked as a magazine editor in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco and freelanced from the Providence, R.I. area.
Featured Spring 2025
Performing Bookishness on the Second Screen
Readers, Authors and Agency in the Online T Magazine Book Club
Donna Harrington-Lueker
Abstract: Research on the social practices of book clubs and shared reading is both well established and on-going, with researchers increasingly turning to the ways in which the affordances of social media and digital cultures both reinforce and complicate our understanding of reading practices. This article examines the New York Times’s T Magazine Book Club, a mix of literary events, elite branding, and online conversation launched in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a combination of online affordances—from YouTube videos and Twitter threads to the so-called “second screen” of live-chat—and sponsored by the iconic fashion brand the House of Chanel, the T Book Club offers insights into what Simone Murray and others have termed the digital literary sphere, the most important of which center on the shifting sands of curation and authority in contemporary book culture and on the uniquely performative nature of bookishness in a pandemic-driven online community of readers. With its incorporation of the free-wheeling and ephemeral world of live chat—where conversations unroll in fits and starts independent of the discourse on the main screen—the T Book Club bears witness to the messiness of reading and the continued resilience and agency of readers.
Access:
Book History, 27(2), Fall 2024.
Abstract Only: DOI 10.1353/bh.2024.a947333
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