For almost seven decades The English Institute has been a major resource for developments in criticism, theory, and scholarship, while honoring traditional fields of interest and modes of literary analysis.

The 2012 conference, our 71st meeting, continues the Institute’s renewed focus on the building blocks of the profession and craft: periodization, genre, authorship, reading, the critic's voice, and other issues of key concern to students, teachers, scholars, and theorists of literature.

The topic for this year's conference is Text. The conference will take place on September 7-9, 2012 at Harvard University's Barker Center. Speakers will include Bill Brown (University of Chicago), Mary Carruthers (New York University), David Scott Kastan (Yale University), Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Rebecca Schneider (Brown University), Michael Silverstein (University of Chicago), and Gauri Viswanathan (Columbia University). The agenda will also include a roundtable discussion based on a group reading of Roland Barthes' "From Work to Text" and Jorge Luis Borges' "Aleph."

You may download the conference brochure here. For a list of accommodations near the conference venue, click here. For more information, please contact Amelia Klein, the Conference Coordinator, at englinst@fas.harvard.edu.

We are grateful for private donations of any size.

The English Institute c/o Barker Center 12 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138