Charles Bernstein teaches poetry and poetics, with an emphasis on modernist and contemporary art, aesthetics, and performance.

Bernstein has published three collections of essays — My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999), A Poetics (Harvard, 1992), and Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon, 1985; rpt Northwestern, 2001). He is the author of over twenty collections of poetry, including Girly Man (Chicago, 2006), With Strings (Chicago, 2001), Republics of Reality: 1975 - 1995 (Sun & Moon, 2000), Dark City (Sun & Moon, 1994), The Sophist (Sun & Moon, 1987; rpt Salt Publishing 2004), Islets/Irritations (Jordan Davies, 1983; rpt. Roof Books, 1992); and Controlling Interests (Roof, 1980). Hislibretto Shadowtime, for composer Brian Ferneyhough, was published in 2005 by Green Integer; it was performed as part of the 2005 Lincoln   (more...)

Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and History of Art at Penn. His work in Cinema Studies has focused on modern American and international cinema, as well as pedagogy and film. Books include New German Film: The Displaced Image, The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History, Writing about Film, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader, and The Film Experience (co-authored with Patricia White). Currently he is completing a book-length study titled “The Essay Film from Montaigne to Marker” and, with Patricia White, an anthology of film theory titled “Critical Visions: Readings in Classical and Contemporary Film and Media Theory.” He is also an editor of the journal Adaptation, an editorial board member of Cinema Journal, and a founding director of the Association  (more...)

Peter Decherney is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focus on the history of media regulation and on internet policy, specifically the interaction between Hollywood and Washington. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia UP, 2005) and many articles on the Hollywood film industry, on the history of media regulation, and on fair use and academia, among other topics. In 2006, along with two colleagues, he successfully petitioned for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for media professors using clips for teaching. In addition to Penn, Decherney has taught at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Tsinghua University (Beijing). He is currently working on a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright law.

Jim English received his MA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Stanford, specializing in modernist and postmodernist British fiction. His book Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain was published by Cornell in 1994. His more recent work has focused on the sociology of literature and especially on its institutional and transnational dimensions. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP) was named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine.  Also published in 2005 was the Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, from Blackwell.  Economy of Prestige was reissued in paperback last year.

He is currently on leave, doing research for a study of the exportation and translation of contemporary British culture, particularly as it relates to different constructions of race and class in the various spaces of  (more...)

Alan Filreis has published several books on the literary politics of modern poetry, a new edition of the radical 1943 novel Tucker's People by Ira Wolfert (Illinois, 1998) an edition of Wallace Stevens's correspondence with Jose Rodriguez Feo (Secretaries of the Moon, 1986), and articles on modern poetry and painting, and the literary and cultural politics of the 1950s. Stevens and the Actual World, a literary biography of Wallace Stevens, was published by Princeton University Press in 1991. Another book, Modernism from Right to Left, was published by Cambridge University Press (1994). Filreis is currently writing a literary history of the American 1950s called The Fifties' Thirties, a study of anticommunist attacks on modern poetry. Aside from teaching modern American poetry, he has offered a series of courses on twentieth-century American decades, and another on the literature of the Holocaust. He is a winner of the Lindback and Ira Abrams Awards for Distinguished  (more...)

David Kazanjian received his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. from Stanford University. His area of specialization is transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century. His additional fields of research are political philosophy, continental philosophy, colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. His book The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota, 2003) offers a comparative study of colonial and antebellum, racial and national formations, and a critique of the formal egalitarianism that animated early U.S. citizenship. He has co-edited (with David L. Eng) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California, 2003), as well as (with Shay Brawn, Bonnie Dow, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, Deb Meem, and Rhonda Pettit) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through  (more...)

Ania Loomba received her BA (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, India, and her Ph. D. from the University of Sussex, UK. She researches and teaches early modern studies, postcolonial studies, histories of race and colonialism, feminist theory, and contemporary Indian literature and society, often exploring the intersections between these fields.

She has previously taught at the University of Delhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, the University of Tulsa, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She was Mellon Fellow at Stanford University and has taught at the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa, as well as the School of Criticism and Theory at Karlskrona, Sweden. She currently holds the Catherine Bryson Chair in the English department. She is also faculty in  (more...)

Heather Love is Associate Professor of English. Her areas of interest include gender studies and queer theory, the literature and culture of modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, sociology and literature, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007) and the co-editor of a special issue of New Literary History ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?"). She is currently at work on a book on the source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 book, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity ("The Stigma Archive").

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania.

A graduate of McGill University who took her MPhil and PhD from Yale, Dr. Steiner's fields are modern literature and critical theory, relations between visual and verbal art, and the contemporary novel. Her book The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (University of Chicago Press) was listed by the New York Times among the "100 Best Books of 1996." Her latest book is Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art (Free Press), published in Europe as The Trouble with Beauty (Heinemann). Other publications include Postmodern Fictions: 1970-1990, volume 8 of the Cambridge History of American Literature, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and  (more...)