Professor Marija Dalbello

Born in Croatia, Professor Dalbello got her PhD in Information Studies from the University of Toronto in 1999. She is has taught at several different universities, including the Univeristy of Toronto and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before coming to Rutgers University. She has also worked in libraries both in the US and in Croatia. Her research has led he to author or co-author over thirty academic papers, some of which were presented at conferences around the world. For more information, visit her website.

Reading Interests of Adults

This class focuses on the examination and evaluation of materials for adult library users, by putting reading in cultural context and considering the specific aesthetic and utilitatian aspects of the genres, including but not limited to horror, mystery, romance, fantasy, westerns, christian fiction, and comic books/graphic novels. Students are asked to consider their own reading profile and motivations and will do an ethnographic study of a reading population on a genre of their choosing.

Moving outside of narrow regular reading habits to sampling from all the genres, Dalbello's class forces students to examine the varied pleasures of reading. The projects push students to examine one genre in depth from both a historical and utilitarian point of view, and in the reader study, from an aesthetic point of view.

For more information, consult the class page. For more information on genres in general, consult the genreflecting page.