Adam Helms lecture 2026: Sarah Brouillette - Platform fiction

Sarah Brouillette gives this year's Adam Helms lecture.

Through case studies of some YA and romance novels, this talk explores how digital platforms are shaping the publishing industry—and the nature of narrative itself. Wattpad promises inclusive community in lieu of payment for writing, and rewards writers who are willing to see themselves as care workers responsible for their readers. Audible turns audiobooks into a way of managing one's moods and maximizing industriousness. TikTok turns the work of marketing books into a fun hobby. Amazon self-publishing blurs passion and entrepreneurialism in a competitive environment where pay is tiny and irregular. Platforms have a gravitational pull today, as people are moving away from immersive print-based reading forms and toward ambient online media that functions on distracted attention—and that is ever present and seemingly cheap. This talk explores new narrative forms and types of work that have arisen in this context.

The lecture will be held in English.
When: November 2, 2026, at 17.30-18.30
Where: Humanistiska teatern, Thunbergsvägen 3, Uppsala

Sarah Brouillette is a Canadian literary and cultural sociologist who has published three books: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave 2007), Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford 2014), and UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford 2019), as well as one “minigraph,' Emerging Forms of Reading: Underdevelopment and African Literature (Cambridge 2021). Her fourth book, Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era, will be published by Duke University Press in October 2026. Her recent research studies Marxist-feminism, the history of family and couple forms, digital labour, and the political and economic contours and implications of platform-based cultural production. She is a Professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa.

About Adam Helms and the lecture series.