Paul Saint-Amour

Paul Saint-Amour is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities and Chair of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. His scholarship at the intersection of literature, history, law, and visual culture explores questions of temporality, obligation, and narrative form. He is the author of two award-winning books: The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (2003), and Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (2015). He attended Yale University and Stanford University and has been a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, the Howard Foundation, and the National Humanities Center.

Saint-Amour’s editorial work includes the collection Modernism & Copyright (2011); special journal issues on counterfactuals, fair use doctrine, and weak theory; and the Modernist Latitudes series, which he co-edits with Jessica Berman for Columbia University Press. He is currently at work on two projects: Attack Decay Sustain Release, a series of personal essays organized around acoustic, pneumatic, and electronic keyboard instruments; and a book-length study of human ethical and aesthetic obligation to the nonhuman, called Does a Cliff Have a Face?