In 2023 The New Yorker published the viral article ‘The End of the English Major’ which documented the drop in enrolments in the humanities across the U.S. What stood out most for Professor Ronan McDonald (University of Melbourne) was the assertion by one featured university professor that the answer could be in our phone devices; that people are reading fewer books—and therefore failing to undertake the level of reading required for a thriving English department.
His fellowship project at the Trinity Long Room Hub ‘Critical Attention: Neurohumanities, Close-Reading and the Distraction Economy’, seeks to explore just this, how ‘close-reading’ as a central skill of English literature studies can help us understand attention and distraction, and understand what the reading brain is doing.