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 production of global English culture. His other current projects include a book on the future of English as a discipline and a special issue of NLH on the "New Sociologies of Literature," co-edited with Rita Felski.  From 1999 until 2004 he was co-editor of Postmodern Culture, an electronic journal distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press. Professor English has taught a range of courses in twentieth-century literature and culture, from general surveys of modernist and postmodernist literature to advanced seminars in globlization, critical theory, and British cinema.