This article reports the outcomes of an exploratory small-scale study to compare lecturer and student conceptions of critical reading at a research-intensive UK institution. Analysis of lecturer and student interviews in four humanities subjects suggests differences in the way lecturers and students conceptualize and articulate the practices of critical reading. Lecturers conceptualize reading as creative and intertextual, a defamilarization of personal experiences of the world and the development of relational ways of understanding through close reading. Conversely, students are found to conceptualize reading as evaluating different perspectives, domesticating new experiences into existing personal value schema and apprehending the text as object. The discussion considers the pedagogical implications of these differences for developing reading practices in the humanities classroom. The article also reflects on the relationship between the capacity to participate in the discourses of criticality and the capacity to enact critical encounters with texts as readers.