Literary Studies and Human Flourishing

James F. English is John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania 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 contemporary British fiction, film, and tele­vision. His books include Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (1994), The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (2005), and The Global Future of English Studies (2012). He is currently studying the history of rating and ranking systems in the arts. Heather Love teaches English and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin ("Rethinking Sex"), and the coeditor 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, reading methods in literary studies, and the figure of the tragic lesbian. Her most recent book, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, was published in October 2021.