James F English Author & Editor

James F. English is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English and the founding director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. His main fields of research are the sociology and economics of culture; the history of literary studies as a discipline; and contemporary British fiction, film, and television. His best-known book is The Economy of Prestige, a study of the history, functions, and effects of prizes in literature and the arts. The Global Future of English Studies was published in 2012 in the Blackwell Manifesto series. His current book project is Beauty by the Numbers, a history of rating and ranking systems in literature and the arts. Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory and Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Additionally, she is the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). Love has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, the ethics of observation, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies.