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...)

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").

Cary Mazer received his PhD in Theatre from Columbia University. He has published a book on Shakespeare, focusing on production history, and has written articles on Shaw, Ibsen, Granville Barker, and Edwardian Theatre. He regularly teaches courses in theatre history, Shakespeare, and modern drama, and has been involved with a number of Penn theatre productions. For many years he chaired the Theatre Arts Major. He is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and English.

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, has published about fifteen books on Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, psychoanalysis and literary theory. His most recent books include The Ghosts of Modernity, (University of Florida Press, 1996), Joyce and the Politics of Egoism (Cambridge UP, 2001) and Jacques Lacan and Literature (Palgrave, 2001). He has recently edited two collections of essays, Writing the Image after Roland Barthes, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) and Jacques Lacan in America (The Other Press, Fall 2000), The Cambridge Companion to Jacques Lacan. (2002) and The Future of Theory (Blackwell, 2002). Recent publications: (2003 Cambridge) Companion to Lacan, editor, 2003 On the diagram: the art of Marjorie Welish, co-edited with Aaron Levy, (2004 Palgrave) Advances to James Joyce, editor, 2004  (more...)

Paul Saint-Amour works on Victorian and modernist literature, with special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies. Having received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Stanford, he taught at Pomona College for ten years before joining the Penn faculty. He has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Center for the Humanities at Cornell, and the National Humanities Center. He is the author of The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell U P, 2003), which won the MLA Prize for a First Book, and of articles in Comparative Literatures Studies, Diacritics, James Joyce Quarterly, Modernism/Modernity, Nineteenth-Century Studies, and a special “Counterfactuals” issue of Representations that he recently co-edited with Catherine Gallagher and Mark Maslan. A piece on total war and Gothic temporality is forthcoming in Gothic and Modernism, ed. John Paul  (more...)

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...)