Downes, Paul

 Paul Downes
Associate Professor of English and American Literature;
Graduate Faculty; Undergraduate Faculty
Office Phone: 416-978-5044
Office Location: Jackman Humanities Building,  Room 731
paul.downes@utoronto.ca
Bookshelf
Office Location and/or Leave Status: Tuesdays 1:00-3:00pm

Degrees
BA (York University, Toronto) PhD (Cornell)

Paul Downes is Associate Professor of English and American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. His teaching and research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and on the intersection of political philosophy and literary theory. His study of founding-era American writing, Democracy, Revolution and Monarchism in Early American Literature, was a co-winner of the Modern Language Association’s prize for a first book. He has a particular interest in marxist and deconstructive political philosophy and in the field of critical human rights theory. He is currently working on a book-length study of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy and its value for the study of the American founding and the American literary tradition.

Publications
Bookshelf
“Does the Declaration of Independence Declare a State of Emergency?” Canadian Review of American Studies 42.1 (2012): 7-20.

“Eighty-Nine Divided by Seventy-Six.” (Review Essay) American Literary History 23.1 (2011): 83-101.

“Homeland Insecurity.” (Review Essay) Early American Literature (2010): 699-713.

“Democratic Terror in ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ and ‘The Man of the Crowd.’ Poe Studies 37 (2004): 31-35.

"Humanitarian Intervention and Melville's Benito Cereno," South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (2004): 465-488.

"Fiction and Democracy," in Blackwell Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865,  (2004): 20-30.

"The Library of America's American Revolution," (review essay) Early American Literature 38.1 (2003): 161-70.

Democracy, Revolution and Monarchism in Early American Literature, Cambridge UP, 2002. (Published in paperback, 2009) http://www.cambridge.org/aus/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521813396

"Nineteenth-Century American Fiction," in The Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1. Ed., Paul Finkelman. New York: Scribners, 2002.

"Constitutional Secrets: Memoirs of Carwin and the Politics of Concealment," Criticism 39.1 (1997): 89-117. (Reprinted in Norton Critical Edition of Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin by Charles Brockden Brown, New York: W.W. Norton, 2011.)

"Sleep-Walking Out of the Revolution: Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly," Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.4 (1996): 413-31.