Hopkins Press Podcast 3.7: Milan Terlunen on "The Pre-Reading Environment"

On this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast, we sat down in the library of the Hopkins Press offices with Milan Terlunen, author of an article in the new issue of Book History entitled “What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment." 

Dr. Terlunen coins this term, "the pre-reading environment" to talk about all the ways we come to know things about a text — a book, a film, etc. — before we read it, if we ever read it. Terlunen's article focuses on newspaper reviews of Agatha Christie's 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Twitter discussions about Hanya Yanagihara's 2016 novel A Little Life, but as you'll learn, pre-reading environments include a broad range of information, from advertising and cover art to spoiler alerts, content warnings, and even film rating systems.

Milan Terlunen is a currently the 2024-25 Tabb Center/AGHI Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins who specializes in public and digital humanities, with a particular emphasis on podcasting. Dr. Terlunen is the co-founder of the Humanities Podcast Network and the host of the How To Read podcast. 

This Spring, he is convening a series of podcasting round tables called What Makes Podcasting Accessible?, featuring podcasters across the Hopkins community and beyond.  Beginning February 27 and running through April, these round tables will be available to attend both in person and streaming as well. On March 26, Hopkins Press Podcast host Rahne Alexander will be among the guests participating in the What Makes Podcasting Accessible? round table. Register for the series here. 

 

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Music for this episode of the Hopkins Press Podcast is “le train sur du velours” by Jean Toba, licensed under an Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License and available at Free Music Archive.