Prof. Stephanie Ann Frampton receives prestigious Scholar-in-Residence fellowship at the Humanities Center at Texas Tech University!

Stephanie Ann Frampton is a writer and scholar based at MIT in Cambridge, MA. She has published widely in on the history of books and their readers from antiquity to today.

Her first book, Empire of Letters (Oxford 2019), examines how Roman authors like Vergil and Cicero reimagined literature, philosophy, and society through the very artifacts of writing: papyrus scrolls, wax tablets, and inscriptions on stone and bronze. Her current project, Words with Friends, is a reflection on how we make connections with others by sharing texts in common and what we can learn about the past and the future from reading the classics in the twenty-first century.

Prof. Frampton is a co-convener of the Seminar in the History of the Book at Harvard. She serves on the Fellowship Committee of the Bibliographical Society of America and the Program Committee of the Society for Classical Studies. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Andrew Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography.  In fall 2025, she was a Writer in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.

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An interactive discussion introducing the concept of “ethical reading.” Participants will explore short texts from Sappho, Cicero, and Shakespeare alongside modern responses by W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Anne Carson, asking how we might read the past without reproducing its exclusions. In-person attendance only.

This session examines friendship and intellectual networks from Cicero to Petrarch to early modern readers of Latin texts. Participants will reflect on reading as an act of belonging and co-creation across languages and times. In-person attendance only.

This culminating discussion engages ecocritical and Indigenous perspectives (Roy Scranton, Timothy Morton, Elvia Wilk, Gerald Vizenor) to explore friendship and care as dimensions of reading in the Anthropocene, considering how texts, like ecosystems, outlast us and invite responsibility toward future generations. In-person attendance only.