Jed Esty
Vartan Gregorian Professor of English
Jed Esty teaches and writes about Anglophone literature after 1850, with special interests in modernism, critical theory, history and theory of the novel, colonial and postcolonial studies, the Victorian novel, and post-45 U.S. culture. He received his BA from Yale and his PhD from Duke. He taught for several years at Harvard and at the University of Illinois before joining the Penn faculty in 2008. Esty is the author of The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at its Limits (Stanford 2022), Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford 2012), and A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton 2004). He is currently at work on a new project entitled Cold War Victorians: The Genre System of the Angloworld. With Joe Cleary and Colleen Lye, he coedited a 2012 special issue of MLQ on the topic of realism in postcolonial and ethnic US literatures; with Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Antoinette Burton, and Matti Bunzl, he coedited Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Duke 2005). Esty has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; he has published essays in Modern Fiction Studies, Victorian Studies, Modernism/Modernity, ALH, ELH, MLQ, PMLA, Representations, Contemporary Literature, Narrative, Novel, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.