Angelina Eimannsberger is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation is titled Trivial Pursuits: Women Readers, Materialist Feminism, and the New Life of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century and explores possibilities and limitations of feminist reading communities in and around book clubs, social media, and the romance genre with a mixed-methods approach that includes literary criticism, digital ethnography, and gender studies. Her most recent publication is the co-authored essay "Genre Juggernaut: Measuring ‘Romance’" in PublicBooks and she has the peer-reviewed article “The Romance Shop Around the Corner: How Women Readers Created a New Kind of Independent Bookstore” forthcoming with New Americanist.
Angelina Eimannsberger
Wolf Humanities Center Associate Scholar
2024—2025 Forum on Keywords
Angelina Eimannsberger
Ph.D. Candidate, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory
Trivial Pursuits: Women Readers, Materialist Feminism, and A New Life of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century
Trivial Pursuits: Women Readers, Materialist Feminism, and A New Life of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century builds on book historical and feminist ethnographic research on reading communities in the 1980s and 1990s to ask how (women) readers experience romance novels and other purportedly low-brow literary forms in the twenty-first century. I revise this question in light of the many new and emergent technologies of literary production and consumption that exist in our current media ecology, including social apps, bookish sites, and online communities. I am especially interested in the way feminist, queer, and BIPOC readerships, largely shut out of high-prestige literary spaces, use books and bookishness to build alternative, counter-patriarchal cultural communities and to develop practices of reparation and resistance.