Jim English is the founder of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, where he served as Faculty Director from 2015 to 2024. From 2011 to 2018 he directed the Penn Humanities Forum and oversaw its relaunch as the Wolf Humanities Center.  He is a former Chair of the English department and has served as interim Director of Cinema Studies and Moderator of the University Council.

Jim received his MA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Stanford, specializing in modernist and contemporary British fiction. His first book, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain, explored the political dimensions of joke-work in the British novel from Conrad and Woolf to Lessing and Rushdie. Since then his work has focused on the sociology of literature and especially on its institutional and transnational dimensions. His influential study of the awards industry, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP), was reviewed in more then sixty journals and newspapers and named Best Academic Book of 2005 by New York Magazine.  The Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction, a collection of essays about the scene and system of literary production in the UK, was published the following year by Blackwell.  His book The Global Future of English Studies was published in 2012 in the Blackwell Manifesto series  It questioned the prevailing narratives of contraction and decline that dominate histories of the discipline, stressing instead the discipline's significant expansion from 1980 to 2010 within a massifying global academic apparatus, and the new challenges and opportunities such dispersive growth presented. He edited and introduced special issues of MLQ on "Scale and Value: New and Digital Approaches to Literary History" (2016) and of NLH on "New Sociologies of Literature" in 2010.  From 1999 to 2005, he was editor of Postmodern Culture.  His writing has appeared in PMLA, Representations, Novel, Critical Inquiry, New York Times, Atlantic, Harpers, Public Books, LA Review of Books, and has been translated into six languages.  He has delivered lectures and keynotes in more than a dozen countries and has discussed the themes of his work on television, radio, and in documentary films in the US and abroad.  

Jim co-edited an essay collection with Heather Love, Literary Studies and Human Flourishing, published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.  It gathers essays from leading scholars across a range of subfields in literary studies, to consider the role our discipline might play in interdisciplinary discussions of happiness, wellbeing, and eudaimonia.  He is currently completing Beauty By the Numbers, a history of rating and ranking systems in literature and art.