Herman Beavers has taught at Penn since 1989. He is the author of Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, which was published in 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He also has a chapbook of poems, A Neighborhood of Feeling (1986) from Doris Publications. His most recent poems have appeared in Callaloo, Cross Connect, and Peregrine.  His most recent critical publications deal with the work of Charles Johnson, August Wilson, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright.  Professor Beavers teaches courses in African American and American literature, including courses on Southern Modernism, 20th Century African American Poetry, and "Trading Fours:  The LIteratures of Jazz," which is a requisite course in the Jazz and Popular Music minor.  He also teaches the introductory poetry workshop in the Creative Writing Program.    Professor Beavers believes that his courses are much more about  (more...)

Thadious M. Davis, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English, received her Ph.D. from Boston University. Her teaching areas include African American literature and Southern literature with an emphasis on issue of race, region, and gender. Her research interests are interdisciplinary: geography and African American writers; photography and Southern women; film and literary modernism; visual culture and the Harlem Renaissance; civil rights law and narrative fiction.

She is the author of Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (2003), Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994; paper 1996) and Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and the editor of numerous reference texts, including the Penguin Classic editions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1997) and Quicksand (2002), and the co-edited Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992). She is currently writing a  (more...)

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...)

Jed Esty specializes in twentieth-century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, with additional interests in critical theory, history and theory of the novel, colonial and postcolonial studies, and the Victorian novel. After receiving his BA from Yale University and PhD from Duke University, he taught for several years at Harvard University and at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) before joining the Penn faculty. He is the author of A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton 2004) and coeditor, with Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Antoinette Burton, and Matti Bunzl, of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke 2005). He is currently at work on a book entitled Tropics of Youth: The Bildungsroman and Colonial Modernity. Esty has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the NEH, and the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois; he has published essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Victorian Studies,  (more...)

Amy Kaplan received her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University, with a specialty in late-nineteenth-century American literature. Working in the interdisciplinary field of American studies, she teaches courses on the culture of imperialism, comparative perspectives on the Americas, and mourning, memory and violence. Her first book, The Social Construction of American Realism, was published by the University of Chicago (1988). She co-edited with Donald Pease, Cultures of U. S. Imperialism (Duke, 1993). Her new book, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, was published by Harvard University Press in 2002. She has received an NEH Fellowship and the Norman Forster prize for the best essay in American Literature in 1998 for "Manifest Domesticity." She has published recent essays on 9/11 and Guantanamo and is currently working on the language and culture of empire today. She has recently published "Imperial Melancholy in America" in  (more...)

Suvir Kaul received his B. A. (Hons.), M. A., and M. Phil. degrees from the University of Delhi, and his Ph. D. from Cornell University. His first job was at the SGTB Khalsa College in Delhi; since then, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at Stanford University, and at the Jamia Milia Islamia as a Visiting Professor. He has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Canterbury at Kent and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. He teaches courses in Eighteenth-century British Literature, Contemporary South Asian Writing in English, and in Literary and Critical Theory. He has published three books, Eighteenth-century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (University Press of Virginia, 2000; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology  (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").

Yolanda Padilla is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Davis, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.  Her area of specialization is U. S. Latina/o literature and culture, with additional interests in hemispheric studies, border studies, race and ethnicity in literature, and in questions of literary production and reception.  She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the role of the Mexican Revolution in shaping early Mexican American letters and politics.  The project studies relatively neglected authors such as Ricardo Flores Magon, Josefina Niggli and Luis Perez, and more familiar writers such as Americo Paredes and Jose Antonio Villareal.  She has coedited (with William Orchard) The Plays of Josefina Niggli:  Landmarks of Latino Literature (Wisconsin, 2007).

Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley, and she specializes in twentieth-century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on American Orientalism and Asian American literature. Her book Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford 2008) reads a history of American literary alliances with East Asia, from Walt Whitman to Myung Mi Kim. Her present research examines Asian American subjectivities shaped by twentieth-century conflicts between the United States and East Asia. Her teaching interests include minority literature, American poetry, modernist poetics, theories of race and subject formation, immigration, and transnationalism.

Chi-ming Yang received her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University and her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. She has taught at Fordham University and held a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship at Barnard College, Columbia University. She specializes in 18th-century British literature and culture, with interests in travel writing, empire, colonialism, and East-West relations. Her book project, The Example of Asia: Importing Virtue in Eighteenth-century England, 1660-1760, is a study of the European fascination with Asia in the early modern period. It focuses on how China becomes an intensely debated example of virtue amidst England’s new consumer culture. Publications related to this theme of early modern Orientalism have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies and the edited collection, Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics. Her new work concerns transatlantic slavery, 17th and 18th  (more...)