I am looking to interview readers of diet books for my dissertation - a project that studies the literary qualities of diet books in their cultural/historical context. The interview should only last about 90 minutes and I will ask you to cut apart or collage one or two books of your choosing. By enlisting readers to physically manipulate the "body" of the book, I hope to demonstrate how dieting culture and diet books are a two-way street -- dieters and readers can speak back, resist, and demand their own autonomy from the books that are all too often positioned as authorities that leave little room for opposition.

The interview/collage shouldn't take much more than an hour or hour and a half and I would simply ask you some basic interview questions about dieting, your experience with these books, and views on weight diversity. I then would ask you to collage or cut apart the cover or some relevant passages in a diet book (I could bring one of your choosing). After I finish the 10 or 12 interviews in a few months, I will collect all the pieces together and create one larger collage that will be housed at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research on campus and on their website (http://gender.stanford.edu/).

My grant allows for a $50 gift card "stipend" for all participants as a token of thanks and this will also be your chance to be a collage artist!

Thanks so much.