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This seminar aims to think hard about the embodied reader and the material realm of reading. Our work will position reading less as a strict function of cognition and more as a matter of phenomenology, sensation, and material structures. Though we will attend to question of vision (and loss of vision) we will also highlight other senses: hearing, touch, smell, taste and bodily proprioception. Course materials will include recent studies that link reading and the senses, as well as texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, a moment when the idea of Literature emerged alongside a theorizing of media and mediation, and investigations linking aesthetics and phenomenology. Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be one guide for the seminar, but so will the ballad revival and the literature of abolition. Seminar participants are invited to target other periods and places in their own research projects for the seminar.