Overview
In this field at Chicago, as at many institutions, faculty and students often work across national cultures and disciplinary divides, using a variety of critical paradigms. This is true for the very strong groups in film and media studies, modernist and contemporary poetry and poetics, cultural studies, twentieth-century theory (particularly Frankfurt School of aesthetics and feminist and gender theory), and fiction and popular culture listed under the Americanist heading. Many of these faculty members direct projects and offer courses on Continental and British materials in addition to their work in American.
The Department frequently collaborates with colleagues in History, Anthropology, Political Science, South Asian, East Asian, Comparative Literature, and the Center for Latin American Studies, for both curricular offerings and the direction of oral examinations and dissertations in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory and transnational and global literatures and cultures. Resources are particularly strong for students interested in South Asian, East Asian, African, and Latin American or Caribbean cultures as these form parts of British and Anglophone literary cultures.
