Tristan Schweiger

Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature, The College

Affiliate Faculty, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture

I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 2015. My research focuses on Atlantic literature of the long eighteenth century. I hold a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in English and Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. My 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 Rob Roy. I have recently published on slavery and ideologies of property in eighteenth-century Caribbean literature. My broader research interests include historicism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and gender theory. Before coming to the University of Chicago, I worked as a reporter, covering state and local politics at a series of newspapers on the East Coast. Outside of my teaching and scholarship, I enjoy the lake trail (when it's not winter), cooking, exploring Chicago's restaurant scene, ships, and airplanes. I am the co-host of the podcast Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective. And I am a proud member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.

Co-host of the podcast “Better Read than Dead: Literature from a Left Perspective.”
 

Ships, Tyrants, and Mutineers (Autumn 2025)
(ENGL 21370/41370) Crosslistings: MAPH 41370

Since the Renaissance beginnings of the “age of sail,” the ship has been one of literature’s most contested, exciting, fraught, and ominous concepts. Ships are, on the one hand, globe-traversing spaces of alterity and possibility that offer freedom from the repression of land-based systems of power. From Lord Byron to Herman Melville to Anita Loos, the ship has been conceived as a site of queerness and one that puts great pressure on normative constructions of gender. At the same time, the ship has been a primary mechanism for the brutality of empire and hegemony of capital, the conduit by which vast wealth has been expropriated from the colony, military domination projected around the world, and millions of people kidnapped and enslaved. Indeed, the horror of the “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic slave trade has been a major focus of inquiry for theorists like Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, interrogating how concepts of racial identity and structures of racism emerge out of oceanic violence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, science-fiction writers have sent ships deep into outer space, reimagining human social relations and even humans-as-species navigating the stars. While focusing on the Enlightenment and 19th century, we will examine literary and filmic texts through the present that have centered on the ship, as well as theoretical texts that will help us to deepen our inquiries. Note: one session will be held at the Newberry Library's maps collections. (Fiction, 18/19)
 

Literature and Philosophy: Knowing, Being, Feeling (Winter 2026)
(ENGL 21213/41213) Crosslistings: MAPH 41213, PHIL 21214/41213

Modern theories of the subject – theories that answer the questions of what we are, how we are, and how we relate to others – have their roots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Philosophers of the era, finding themselves free to diverge from classical accounts of the human and its world, pursued anew such questions as: What is the mind and how does it come by its ideas? How do we attain a sense of self? Are we fundamentally social creatures, or does the social (at best) represent a restriction on our animal drives and passions? Literature, meanwhile, examined these questions in its own distinct manner, and in doing so witnessed what many scholars recognize as the birth of the novel – a genre for which accounts of the subject are of central importance. This interdisciplinary course will read widely in Early Modern and “Enlightenment” literature and philosophy to better understand the roots of contemporary accounts of the subject and the social. Philosophical readings will include texts by John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Mary Astell, Thomas Reid, Marya Schechtman, and Stephen Darwall. Literary readings will include Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, Horace Walpole, Eliza Haywood, John Cleland, Ignatius Sancho, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen. Open to undergraduate and MA students, and all others with consent. Co-taught with MAPH Preceptor Andrew Pitel.