Tristan Schweiger

Tristan Schweiger
Assistant Instructional Professor
Pronouns: he/him/his

Biography

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.”


Current/Upcoming Courses:

Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation (Winter 2025)
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as a landmark case – an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

Working 9 to 5 (Spring 2025)
This course will examine representations of labor and labor struggle in literature, film, and music spanning the 18th through 21st centuries. Theoretical and critical readings will bring Marxist and feminist lenses to the primary texts at hand, in addition to examinations of race, labor, and capital. Primary texts might include Robinson Crusoe, Bartleby the Scrivener, Mary Barton, Blood on the Forge, Sister Carrie, Lucy, 9 to 5, Harlan County USA, and Office Space.