James Kenneth Chandler

Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English, Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, Founder and Director of the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Media Studies.  His research interests include British and Irish literature since the early Enlightenment, American cinema, the politics of interpretation, and the relationship of literary criticism to film criticism. England in 1819 (University of Chicago Press, 1998) his study of literary historicism and its limits, won the Press’s Laing Prize in 2000.  Recent publications include The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2009) and An Archaeology of Sympathy:  The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2013), which traces the formal foundations of modern narrative cinema to the early sentimentalist moment of literature and moral philosophy.  He is currently at work on a book about practical criticism in literature and cinema.