Judith Robertson

Judith Robertson's work in education focuses on the inner life of reading experience. The interdisciplines of literary studies, education, psychoanalysis, film studies, critical and cultural studies, and time/space theories challenge knowledge of reading experience as something difficult to pin down or instrumentalize, a deeply affective mental dynamic situated within mobile matrices of memory, desire, context, imagination, and genius loci. Throughout her academic career she studied reading formations in many guises, including children's responses to stories, beginning teacher's expressions of love in relation to cinematic stories of teaching, island book club readers' uses of urban enislement to generate hope and generosity towards the Other through communal reading practice, and the seductions of particular kinds of stories/films over readers of all ages and persuasions. Her current work is with readers who engage in serial rituals of passionate pilgrimage or literary travel in order to engage with beloved authors (usually dead) in archival settings. She is a poet and painter, and a retired full professor of education and women’s studies.