"Contexts of Digital Reading: How Genres Affect Reading Practices" is a study of the different ways university students use digital devices to read. Many mainstream representations of digital reading fail to distinguish between different contexts or genres of reading, making digital reading appear transparent rather than mediated by device or purpose. Furthermore, research on student reading deficiencies often locates reading problems in the textual medium (linking digital technologies to greater reading problems than print) rather than in the situations where reading takes place. Contrary to that line of thinking, my dissertation demonstrates that reading is a complex process shaped by material conditions and by shifting variables. Readers' practices are constantly changing depending on the different situations where they read; the available technologies; and emotional and environmental factors like energy, mood, their physical location, and time of day. This project seeks to further explore the different ways students use their digital technologies depending on these variables and complicate existing pictures of digital readers. Drawing on new media, genre, and reading studies scholarship, "Contexts of Digital Reading" uses surveys and interviews to examine how students' reading practices change with different devices and situations. The participants reveal that they rely heavily on laptops and smartphones in their daily communications; that their practices change along with different contexts; and that reading instruction is performed in varying ways. To account for the inconsistencies with reading instruction, I offer instructors assignments that can help students become aware of the practices they perform in different situations and provide opportunities for using digital annotation technologies. Within composition and rhetoric, the ability to read well (and accompanying practices like mindfulness and purposeful engagement with texts) can help students to produce more effective writing. My study reinvigorates reading as a necessary, yet often taken for granted, part of the composing process by calling attention to the materiality of reading. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]