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 Herman Melville and on the intersection of political and literary theories of representation.