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James English

John Welsh Centennial Professor of English

Faculty Director, Price Lab for Digital Humanities

(he/him/his)

Curriculum Vitae

Fisher-Bennett Hall 311

Office Hours

fall 2024

On Leave Fall 2024

Jim English Photo

Jim English is the founder of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, where he served as Faculty Director from 2015 to 2024. From 2011 to 2018 he directed the Penn Humanities Forum and oversaw its relaunch as the Wolf Humanities Center.  He is a former Chair of the English department and has served as interim Director of Cinema Studies and Moderator of the University Council.

Jim received his MA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Stanford, specializing in modernist and contemporary British fiction. His first book, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain, explored the political dimensions of joke-work in the British novel from Conrad and Woolf to Lessing and Rushdie. Since then his work has focused on the sociology of literature and especially on its institutional and transnational dimensions. His influential study of the awards industry, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP), was reviewed in more then sixty journals and newspapers and named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine.  The Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, a collection of essays about the scene and system of literary production in the UK, was published the following year by Blackwell.  His book The Global Future of English Studies was published in 2012 in the Blackwell Manifesto series  It rethinks the prevailing narratives of contraction and decline that dominate histories of the discipline, stressing instead the discipline's expansion within a massifying global academic apparatus, and the new challenges and opportunities such dispersive growth presents.  He edited and introduced special issues of MLQ on "Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History" (2016) and of NLH on "New Sociologies of Literature" in 2010.  From 1999 to 2005, he was editor of Postmodern Culture.  His writing has appeared in PMLARepresentations, Novel, Critical InquiryNew York Times, Atlantic, Harpers, Public Books, LA Review of Books, and has been translated into six languages.  He has delivered lectures and keynotes in more than a dozen countries and has appeared to discuss his work on television, radio, and in documentary films in the US and abroad.  

Jim co-edited an essay collection with Heather Love, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.  It gathers essays from leading scholars across a range of subfields in literary studies, to consider the role our discipline might play in interdisciplinary discussions of happiness, wellbeing, and eudaimonia.  He is currently completing Beauty By the Numbers, a history of rating and ranking systems in literature and art. 

Recipient of the 2016 Ira Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching, Jim has taught a range of courses from general surveys of modernist and contemporary literature to advanced seminars in globlization, critical theory, British cinema, and the audiobook. In 2016-17 he taught a class on literary awards with focus on the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, for which he served as the chair of the judging panel. More recently he has taught "Literature as a Marketplace" and "The Novel in the Age of the Audiobook."  At the graduate level, he has directed 25 dissertations in English and Comparative Literature and served on nearly 50 doctoral committees.

For a more complete account of Jim English's publications and professional activities, see his CV, linked at the top of this page.

Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

"Now Not Now: Counting Time In Contemporary Fiction Studies" MLQ Special Issue on Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History (2016)
"Shifting Scales: Between Literature and Social Science" Co-author with Ted Underwood. MLQ Special Issue on Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History (2016)
"Everywhere and Nowhere: The Sociology of Literature after 'The Sociology of Literature'" NLH: Special Issue on New Sociologies of Literature (2010)
"Literary Studies" Tony Bennett and John Frow, eds., Sage Handbook of Cultural Analysis (2008)

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2022

Sherif H. Ismail "Time is Many: The Anthropocene, Literary Form, and the New Contemporary"

2017

Laura Finch "Intimate Economies: Financial Citizenship and Literary Form in the Contemporary Novel"
Chris Jimenez "The Exploding Globe: Scale and Catastrophe in Contemporary Anglophone Literature"

2012

Melanie Micir "Public Lives, Intimate Archives: Queer Biographical Practices in British Women's Writing"

2011

Mearah Quinn-Brauner "Recovering the Conflicts: Memoirs of the Late-Twentieth Century American Literary Academy"

2010

John Connor "Mid-Century Romance: Modernist Afterlives of the Historical Novel"
Greg Steirer "‘Raise the Black Flag’: The Neoliberal Aesthetic in 1970s Britain"

2008

Anna Ivy "From Princeton to Paradise: Women's Reading in Academic and Popular Culture"

2007

Laura Heffernan "'Bad Form': Modernist Criticism and the Cultural Life of the Aesthetic, 1909-1929"
Matthew Merlino "The Contemporary Historical Novel and the Unsettling of America"
Matthew Ruben "Cultural, Political, and Spatial Transformation in the Late Twentieth Century United States"
Nancy Srebro "Adjusting the Focus: The Modern British Novel and the Rise of American Film"

2006

Jeffrey Dillon Brown "Occidental Drift: London, Modernism and the Politics of Form in Early West Indian Fiction"

2002

Sue Sun Yom "Sex And The American Soldier: Military Cinema and the War on Venereal Disease, 1918-1969"

2001

Jonna Mackin "Subject to Laughter: Comedy and Ethnicity in Contemporary American Fiction"

1998

Giselle Anatol "Mother Countries, Motherlands, and Mother Love: Representations of Motherhood in 20th-Century Caribbean Women's Literature"

1997

Sam Choi "Machines of Metaphor: Myths and Materials of Computer Culture"
Rhonda Frederick "The Colon People: Reading Caribbeanness through the Panama Canal"
Geoffrey Sharpless "The Erotics of Culture: Masculinity and the Victorian Public School"

Courses Taught

spring 2024

fall 2023

ENGL 1094.301 Literature as a Marketplace  

spring 2023

ENGL 2420.401 British Cinema  

fall 2022

spring 2022

ENGL 295.401 British Cinema  

fall 2021

ENGL 074.001 Literature as a Marketplace  

spring 2021

ENGL 009.401 Intro to Digital Humanities  

fall 2020

ENGL 295.401 British Cinema  

spring 2020

fall 2019

ENGL 074.001 Literature as a Marketplace  

fall 2017

fall 2016

ENGL 274.301 Novel of the Year  
ENGL 295.401 British Cinema canceled  

spring 2016

ENGL 265.301 Novels and Novelists Now canceled  

spring 2015

ENGL 295.402 British Cinema  

fall 2014

spring 2013

ENGL 065.001 British Novel Since 1900  

fall 2012

ENGL 295.401 British Cinema  

spring 2012

ENGL 065.001 20th Century Novel  

fall 2011

ENGL 065.401 20th Century British Fiction canceled  

spring 2011

fall 2010

ENGL 016.401 British Cinema  
ENGL 059.401 Modernisms and Mondernities canceled  

spring 2010

fall 2009

spring 2007

ENGL 801.301 Pedagogy  

fall 2006

spring 2006

spring 2005

ENGL 311.302 The Honors Essay  

fall 2004

spring 2003

ENGL 065.001 20th Century British Novel  
ENGL 261.401 Contemporary British Cinema  

fall 2002

ENGL 774.301 Globalization  

spring 2002

ENGL 104.401 The Twentieth Century  
ENGL 261.401 Contemporary British Cinema  

fall 2001

ENGL 800.301 Teaching of Literature  

spring 2001

fall 2000

spring 1999

fall 1998

spring 1997

ENGL 571.401 Marx to Bourdieu  

fall 1995

spring 1995

ENGL 001.001 Independent Study  
ENGL 104.001 The Twentieth Century  
ENGL 309.301 Junior Honors Seminar  

fall 1988

ENGL 095.800 Romantics and Modernists