Max Cavitch joined Penn's faculty in 1999, after receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Rutgers.  He teaches all forms and phases of American literature from the beginnings of English contact and settlement to the present day.  His teaching and research interests also include gender and sexuality studies, historical poetics, and cinema.  His book American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman was recently published by the University of Minnesota Press. He has also published essays on a variety of topics in the journals American Literary History, American Literature, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Early American Literature, Screen, and Victorian Poetry.  He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati, the Penn Humanities Forum, and Cornell's Society for the  (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...)

Michael Gamer is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation (Cambridge, 2000). He is currently at work on two books: Recollections in Tranquility: The Collected Author and the Institutionalization of Romanticism; and A History of British Theatre: Staged Conflicts, under contract with Blackwell Publishing. He is editor of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (Penguin, 2002) and Charlotte Smith's Manon L'Escaut and the Romance of Real Life (Pickering and Chatto, 2005). He works on collaboration and is fond of collaborative work: with Jeffrey Cox he edited The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Drama (Broadview, 2003); with Dahlia Porter Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800 (Broadview, 2008). He has also published essays in MLQ, PMLA, Novel, ELH, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Studies in  (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...)

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...)