Paul Downes

Professor, Department of English

Areas of interest

American literature
18th-Century literature
Aspects of theory

Biography

Paul Downes is Professor of English and American Literature in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, specializing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and in the relationship between literature and political philosophy. He is the author of Democracy, Revolution and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge, 2002) and Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature (Cambridge, 2015). He is currently writing on the politics and aesthetics of protection from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

Select publications

“The ‘Mystical Cosmetic’: White Light and the Ideology of Energy in Moby Dick” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 26.3 (2024): 69-80.
"Like A Prayer: Petitioning in Revolutionary America." Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature. Ed. Bryce Traister (Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2020).
"From Lima to Attica: Benito Cereno, the Nixon Recordings and the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971." Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics and Media After Melville, ed. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
"Oracular Ventriloquism: Political Theology in The Female American." Political Theology 19.7 (2018): 621-28.
"Sovereignty and Grace: Hobbes and the Puritans," in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, ed. Bryce Traister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 23-37.
"Melville's Leviathan" in Melville's Philosophies, eds. Branka Arsić and K.L. Evans (London: Bloomsbury, 2017): 315-36.
Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature, Cambridge UP, 2015.
Review of Greg Grandin’s Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 17.1 (2015): 85-91.