Opening Address

Jed Esty is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in 20th-century British, Irish, and postcolonial literatures, with additional interests in modernism, critical theory, history and theory of the novel, colonial and postcolonial studies, the Victorian novel, and post-45 US culture. He received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from Duke University. He taught for several years at Harvard University and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. 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 he is currently at work on a new project, Cold War Victorians: How the British Imagination Shaped American Power. With Joe Cleary and Colleen Lye, he is coeditor of a 2012 special issue of MLQ on the topic of realism in postcolonial and ethnic US literatures, and with Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Antoinette Burton, and Matti Bunzl, he coedited 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.