Biography
Tristan Schweiger received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 2015. His research focuses on Atlantic literature of the long eighteenth century. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in English and Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation, "Planters, Mariners, Nabobs, and Squires: Masculine Types and Imperial Ideology, 1719-1817," assesses the intersection of gender and empire in texts spanning Robinson Crusoe to The Wild Irish Girl and Rob Roy. He has published on slavery and ideologies of property in eighteenth-century Caribbean literature. His broader research interests include historicism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and gender theory. Before returning to academia, he worked as a reporter covering state and local politics at a series of newspapers on the East Coast. Outside the classroom, he discusses a broad spectrum of literary works as the co-host of the podcast Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective. He is a proud member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.
Publications
“Grainger’s West-Indian Planter: Property and Authority in The Sugar-Cane,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50.4 (Summer 2017)
“Book Review: Timothy Michael, British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason,” Modern Philology 115.1 (August 2017)
Recently Taught Courses
- Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers
- Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
- Bodies, Feelings, and Unmentionable Wounds: The Enlightenment and the Comic Novel
- Foundations of Interpretive Theory
- Islands and Otherness