Opening Address

Jed Esty is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania where he specializes in 20th-century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures. He is the author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (2012) and A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2004), and his Opening Address is drawn from his new research project entitled "Cold War Victorians: How the British Imagination Shaped American Power." He is co-editor of a 2012 special issue of MLQ on the topic of realism in postcolonial and ethnic US literatures, as well as of Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (2005). Professor Esty has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.