Reading takes time

“The only way one can read a novel is, quite simply, to read it”.”

For Ben Davies, one of our newest Chairs, that simple observation captures something essential. Reading, he insists, has no shortcut. You cannot outsource the experience, the thinking, or the cognitive work that unfolds along the way.

At a moment when artificial intelligence increasingly promises efficiency and ease, Davies returns to something stubbornly human. “You can’t outsource the experiential, cognitive aspects of reading,” he says. Reading takes time - not as a flaw, but as one of its defining features. 

Why reading (still) matters

Davies is Professor of Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, affiliated with both the Department of Culture and Language and the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS). His research focuses on modern and contemporary literature, narrative theory, and practices of reading.

At its core lies a deceptively simple question: how do people read - and why does it matter?

“I think reading is one of the most important things we do as human beings,” Davies says. Not because it makes us morally better (it doesn’t) but because reading shapes how we think. “It affects the kinds of claims or statements we’re able to make.”

Becoming a reader himself

That interest began early. Growing up outside of London, Davies was the only reader in his family. “My parents didn’t read, my sister didn’t read… It was pretty much just me,” he recalls.

Reading became a way to differentiate himself, to succeed at school, and to find a space for ideas that did not exist close to home. Teachers encouraged him, and he gravitated toward English and philosophy, drawn to the relations between language and thought.

When philosophy meets literature

As a teenager studying A-levels, philosophy proved especially influential. Reading Descartes’ Meditations introduced Davies to – what he then saw as – the radical possibility that the foundations of knowledge could be questioned and, possibly, rebuilt.

“The idea that you could rethink the foundations of knowledge - that really struck me,” he says.

At the same time, philosophical texts revealed something else. Ideas did not exist in the abstract; they were written, shaped, embodied in language. Even Socrates, who famously did not write, survives through Plato’s dialogues.

“These weren’t just pure ideas,” Davies reflects. “They were textually articulated. Thought in and through writing.”

That insight stayed with him.

Reading in practice

As a student and later a scholar, Davies’ work was highly influenced by theory. He was interested in how texts function, how meaning is produced, delayed, or concealed.

But over the past several years, another dimension entered his research: readers themselves.

“I became more interested in how people actually read – in academia and beyond,” he explains. When do scholars and students read? How do they make time for it? And how do institutional pressures shape what kind of reading becomes possible?

This shift led Davies to combine literary theory with sociological approaches to reading, examining not only texts, but reading as a lived practice.

Time, attention, and freedom

Time sits at the center of these questions. Reading is always time-bound, we only have so much of it. Yet, reading also allows us to move through time in ways other media do not.

“We all read at different speeds,” Davies notes. “So, our experience of time while reading is different.” Unlike a film, where time is fixed, reading grants a personal rhythm shaped by attention, interruption, and return.

Reading, he argues, is temporally complex. It involves the time of the narrative, the time of narration, and the time of the reader, all unfolding at once.

“Thinking about time is, in some ways, thinking about who we are,” he says.

What happens if reading disappears?

These questions have become increasingly urgent. In contemporary universities, reading is often expected to justify itself through output. At the same time, new technologies make it tempting to outsource reading altogether.

Davies is particularly wary of what he sees as a new kind of pretense. “With AI, it becomes easier to act as if you’ve read something, when you haven’t,” he says.

What happens, he asks, if reading becomes something we simulate rather than do? What happens to academic culture - and to the university itself - if sustained reading is lost?

Why DIAS

It was this commitment to serious thinking that drew Davies to DIAS. What appealed to him was not a specific program or output, but the institute’s dedication to curiosity and intellectual adventure.

“DIAS is committed to the serious process of thinking, to creating new ideas and exploring them,” he says.

Equally important is the interdisciplinary environment. “Projects on reading cut across all sorts of disciplines,” Davies notes, adding that he is eager to learn from others as much as to share his own work.

As part of the DIAS community, Davies hopes to contribute as a collaborative colleague willing to take risks, embrace uncertainty, and engage across disciplinary boundaries.

“Some of our best ideas come from collaboration in a broad sense,” he reflects, “from encountering perspectives you wouldn’t meet in your own field.”

At DIAS, he hopes both to learn and to demonstrate why literature and the humanities remain essential - to universities, and to human ways of being.
Reading, after all, takes time.

And perhaps that is precisely why it matters.