Most major studies of the discipline of English that I know of, such as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Franklin E. Court’s Institutionalizing English Literature: Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), situate its birth as “English language and literature” in 1828 at the University of