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Paul Saint-Amour

Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities

Graduate Chair

(he/him/his)

Curriculum Vitae

Fisher-Bennett Hall 132
215-746-3529
Fisher-Bennett Hall 215
215-746-3764

Office Hours

fall 2024

M 1:30 - 3 pm & W 10:30 a.m. - noon

Paul Saint-Amour works on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature and has special interests in the novel, law, trauma, visual culture, sound studies, and the environmental humanities. He received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Stanford and has been a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for the Humanities at Cornell, the Howard Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Saint-Amour's The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Cornell UP, 2003) won the MLA Prize for a First Book. His articles have appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, DiacriticsELHMLQModernism/modernity, Novel, PMLA, and Representations. His most recent book, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford UP, 2015), won the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and the MLA's first annual Matei Calinescu Prize.

Saint-Amour has served as president of the Modernist Studies Association and as a trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF). A panel he chaired for the IJJF produced a detailed FAQ on the copyright status of Joyce's work and the general parameters of scholarly fair use. He has served on the editorial board of PMLA and has chaired the faculty editorial board of the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is currently a trustee of the English Institute.

With Jessica Berman, Saint-Amour co-edits the Modernist Latitudes book series at Columbia UP. He edited the volume Modernism and Copyright (2011) for Oxford UP's Modernist Literature and Culture series. In 2018 he edited a special issue of Modernism/modernity on weak theory.

Publications

Articles and Book Chapters

"Afterword: Deep War Time" Modernism/modernity (2020)
"There Is Grief of a Tree" American Imago (2020)
"Still Weak After All These Years" with Grace E. Lavery. Modernism/modernity (2019)
"Weak Theory, Weak Modernism" Modernism/modernity (2018)
"Ulysses Pianola" PMLA (2015)
"On the Partiality of Total War" Critical Inquiry (2014)
"An Interlude: We Have Never Been Modernists" English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 (2013)
"Queer Temporalities of the Nuclear Condition" The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World (2013)
"War, Optics, Fiction" NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction (2010)
"Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism" Comparative Literature Studies (2005)
"Modernist Reconnaissance" Modernism/modernity (2003)

News & Events

Doctoral Dissertations Chaired

2024

2021

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach "Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry"
Kaushik Ramu "Scaling Naïveté: Deep Time and the Slow Bourgeoisie"

2016

Kelly Mee Rich "States of Repair: Institutions of Private Life in the Postwar Anglophone Novel"
Gabriel Sessions "To Feel Thought as Immediately as a Rose: Philosophy, Modernism, and Utopian Collaborations"

2015

Jessica Hurley "Ground Zero at the City on a Hill: Apocalypse and the Politics of Form in the Nuclear Age"

2014

Beth Blum "Proverbial Modernism: Difficult Literature and the Self-Help Hermeneutic"

2013

Grace Lavery "Empire in a Glass Case: Japanese Beauty, British Culture, and Transnational Aestheticism"

Courses Taught

fall 2024

ENGL 0506.301 Virginia Woolf  
ENGL 6000.301 Proseminar  

spring 2024

ENGL 5840.401 Narrating Environment  

fall 2023

ENGL 0350.301 Climate Fiction  
ENGL 2082.401 Nuclear Fictions  

spring 2022

fall 2021

ENGL 364.301 Virginia Woolf  

spring 2021

fall 2020

ENGL 016.302 Climate Fiction  

fall 2019

fall 2018

ENGL 016.302 Climate Fiction  

spring 2018

ENGL 061.401 This is Modernism  
ENGL 584.401 Narrating Environment  

fall 2017

ENGL 016.302 Counterfictions  
ENGL 364.301 Virginia Woolf  

spring 2017

spring 2016

ENGL 016.301 Trauma, Time, and Fiction  

fall 2015

ENGL 311.301 English Honors Program  
ENGL 600.301 Proseminar  

summer 2015

spring 2015

ENGL 059.401 This is Modernism  
ENGL 564.401 War, Form, and Theory  

fall 2014

ENGL 258.301 James Joyce  
ENGL 311.301 The English Honors Program  

summer 2014

spring 2013

ENGL 564.301 War, Form, and Theory  

fall 2012

ENGL 364.301 Nuclear Epic  

spring 2012

ENGL 259.301 Aestheticism and Decadence  

fall 2011

fall 2010

ENGL 765.401 War, Form, and Theory  

spring 2009

ENGL 568.301 Late Joyce  
ENGL 768.301 Late Joyce  

fall 2008

ENGL 016.302 Trauma, Time, Fiction  
ENGL 264.301 Nuclear Epic  

spring 2008

ENGL 259.401 Aestheticism and Decadence  

fall 2007

ENGL 765.401 Interwar Epic