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What is reading? The question is not meant metaphorically. “We take for granted,” Mark Taylor writes, “our capacities to invent and interpret, and devote ourselves to exercising those capacities and publishing the results.” Yet, he continues, “It is the capacities themselves that need explaining. Reading is not giving a reading . . . Giving readings is important and could be done better if we understood reading. . . . The most amazing phenomenon our profession confronts, and the one for which we have the least explanation, is that a reader can make sense of a text, and that there are certain regularities across the individual senses made of a given text” (Taylor 19). This seminar aims to bring us close to understanding the “most amazing phenomenon our profession confronts,” drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology, history of the book, disability studies, and theories of media new and old. We will consider debates about modes of reading as different as paleography, Braille, and scansion, and reckon with the possibility of non-human reading. I hope to invite in faculty from Cognitive Science and Informatics, Disabilities Studies, Classics and Library Science to explain what they mean when they talk about reading. But the final goal of the seminar is to help us identify the importance of literary studies in that conversation. To what extent does the literary object teach us about reading?