Jim English

Jim English is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at Penn, Director of the Wolf Humanities Center, and Founding Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities.  

His main fields of research are the sociology and economics of culture; the history of literary studies as a discipline; and British fiction, film, and television since the 1930s. 

His books include Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cornell 1994), The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard 2005), and The Global Future of English Studies (Blackwell, 2012).  

He is editor of The Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction (2005), a collection of essays about the scene and system of literary production in the UK;  two special journal issues, Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History (2016) and New Sociologies of Literature (2010); and he was for five years editor of Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed all-electronic journal in the humanities.  

He is currently writing a book about the history of counting and ranking in literature and the arts.