About Us
Learn what we're all about!
Our story
ReaderBank is the world's most ambitious study of reading, imagination, and wellbeing. Every day, readers around the world lose themselves in novels or poetry, but how and why that happens can be mysterious and unexpected. With ReaderBank, we are aiming to collect a variety of information on what it is to read and imagine. From lively festivals like the Edinburgh International Book Festival and Jaipur Literature Festival, to our own workshops and projects, we collate stories of how literature touches lives across the globe.
ReaderBank is funded by Wellcome as part of Durham University’s Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. The aim of the platform is to find new and creative methods to understand health, working in partnership with charities and organisations to change how research happens. With ReaderBank, we have teamed up with Edinburgh to make literary festivals sites for experimentation. We’re studying reading to know more about the imagination, but also lots of other things crucial to understanding mental health. This includes how our minds can tell from reality or fantasy, become immersed in new worlds, or create imaginary people.
Over the coming years, this project will create a large, longitudinal, open-source database containing information provided by readers from all over the world. The ReaderBank aims to be a ‘Biobank for the Imagination’ – a growing body of knowledge and experiences that will help us understand more about the reading mind. We want to create something for readers and writers, editors and publishers, and clinicians and researchers to explore together.
Our mission
ReaderBank explores reading experiences to understand how we imagine, how we think, how we feel, and how we inhabit our everyday worlds.
We believe that by exploring reading experiences, we can learn more about empathy, creativity, the imagination, and mental health. Understanding the hidden ways that reading affects us can help enhance our everyday lives, making us more connected to each other and more aware of ourselves.
“ReaderBank is somewhere where festival goers can come each year and take part in new research in undertanding the reading brain.”
Ben Alderson-Day
Lead Researcher, ReaderBank
Meet the team
ReaderBank is a sum of its parts. Our team are an interdiciplinary group of researchers based at Durham University’s Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH). We work with our amazing collaborators from far and wide to make our research into reading what it is.
Ben Alderson Day
Lead Researcher
Durham University
Georgia Punton
Research Associate
Durham University
Arya Ray
Research Assistant
Durham University
Marco Bernini
Laboratory Lead
Durham University
Nick Barley
Professor in Practice
Durham University
Mary Robson
Senior Creative Facilitator
Durham University
Angela Woods
Platform Director
Durham University
Nadine Lavan
Research Fellow
Collaborator
Fraser Young
Software Engineer
Collaborator
Ready to get started?
Dive into our unique library of interactive experiences designed to unlock the mysteries of reading and imagination. Every module you explore helps us uncover how stories shape our minds and how imagination works. Join the adventure—your participation fuels groundbreaking research into the science of reading!
Contact
Institute for Medical Humanities
Confluence Building, Stockton Road
Durham University, DH1 3LE