Uchicago — English Department

JHS
Thu, 24 May 2018 13:02:05 +0000

The University of Chicago’s preeminence in English is of recent vintage. Norman Maclean was a legendary teacher of undergraduates, but far from a legendary scholar. His literary reputation is based on journalism he did quite late in life. As noted, in the past generation, Chicago’s most influential figures in the world of literary studies tended to reside outside the English Department – not merely Bellow, but notably Allan Bloom, Paul Ricoeur, Mark Strand, Herman Sinaiko. David Bevington in the English Department was a first-rank Shakespeare scholar. The large humanities terminal masters program also touched a number of future stars like Roth.

Its current high standing, I believe, is due essentially to being super-hip and having successfully caught some of the major waves in literary studies fashion. Chicago’s English Department seems strongest – and perhaps stronger than anyone else’s department – in gender and sexuality studies, led by Lauren Berlant and Deborah Nelson. It also has strength in media studies. Like any good department, it has a very solid array of literary historians of the 17th-19th Centuries and a lot of people covering issues of race, colonialism, and third-world literature, as well as people working across disciplines (lots of history and politics). It gets a huge boost in attracting faculty and top grad students by being in a major city where it’s interesting to live and spouses can maybe get jobs.