Paul Giles

Biography

Paul Giles has been Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney since 2010. He was previously Professor of American Literature at Oxford University (2002-09), and has also worked at the universities of Cambridge, Nottingham, Portland State University (Oregon), and North Staffordshire Polytechnic. He served as Director of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University between 2003 and 2008, and as President of the International American Studies Association between 2005 to 2007.

Paul Giles, Challis Professor of English at The University of Sydney, is recognised as a major figure in transnational literary criticism with specific reference to the US, Britain and now Australia. He has produced a formidable body of scholarly work since the mid-1980s, beginning with a study of Hart Crane (1986), followed by American Catholic Arts and Fictions (1992), which explored the role of Catholicism in literature and film as a counterweight to the dominance of Protestantism in the US cultural imaginary. Three major interrelated monographs, appearing in the 2000s, established Giles’s reputation in the forefront of transatlantic studies: Transatlantic Insurrections (2001), Virtual Americas (2002), and Atlantic Republic (2006). A further monograph entitled Antipodean America, on the transpacific and Australasian dimensions of American literature, was published in 2013, followed in 2019 by Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture . Other books include The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011).