Our people

Professor Paul Giles, FAHA

Professor of English

Areas of expertise: American literature; Anglophone literatures in transnational context; cultural studies of religion

HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full

ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5183-2366

Phone: +61 3 9953 3526

Email: Paul.Giles@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Melbourne Campus

Paul Giles is Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. He is the author of eleven monographs and numerous essays on English, American and Australian literature and culture. Published books include American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge UP, 1992), Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Duke UP, 2002), Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (Oxford UP, 2006), Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of US Literature (Oxford UP, 2013), and The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions (Oxford UP, 2021). He is currently completing a trilogy of books on representations of time in Western culture. 

Select publications

• Giles, P. (2022). “Wordsworth’s Antipodean Poetics,” Studies in Romanticism, 61.3: 379-404. doi:10.1353/srm.2022.0028
• Giles, P. (2022). “Forms of Opposition in American Literary Criticism,” American Literary History, 34.1 (Spring 2022): 1-16.
• Giles, P. (2021). “Irish-Australian Literature: Ghosts, Genealogy, Tradition,” Australian Literary Studies, special issue on “The Uses of ‘Irish-Australian’ Literature, 36.2 (Sept. 2021): DOI:10.20314/als.cb1be7642a.
• Giles, P. (2021). “Antipodean American Literary Studies: An Interview with Paul Giles,” Transatlantica:Révue d’Etudes Américaines, Issue 2, 2021. DOI: 10.4000/transatlantica.17470
• Giles, P. (2021). “Antipodal Turns: Antipodean Americas and the Hemispheric Shift,” in The Cambridge History of World Literature, ed. Debjani Ganguly (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 477-94. DOI: 10.1017/9781009064446.026
• Giles, P. (2021). “Pacific Surrealism,” in Cambridge Critical Concepts: Surrealism, ed. Natalya Lusty (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 325-41. DOI: 10.1017/9781108862639.019
• Giles, P. (2021). The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions (Oxford University Press). ISBN: 9780198857723. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198857723.001.0001
• Giles, P. (2021). “The Crosstemporal Conundrum: Indigenous Specters in Antebellum American Literature,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 66.2, pp. 331-54. DOI: 10.33675/AMST/2021/2/5.
• Giles, P. (2021). “Transpacific American Literature: Curriculum, Cartography, Crossover.” Southeast Asian Review of English, 58(2), 14-29. DOI: 10.22452/SARE.VOL58NO2.2"
• Giles, P. (2020). “‘By Degrees’: Jane Austen's Chronometric Style of World Literature.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 75(3), 265-293. DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2020.75.3.265
• Giles, P. (2019). American World Literature: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN: 978-1-119-43164-0. DOI: 10.1002/9781119431664
  Giles, P. (2019). Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0198830443. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198830443.001.0001
• Giles, P. (2019). “Introduction.” In Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda; True History of the Kelly Gang (pp. vii-xvii). ISBN: 9781841593968. London: Alfred A. Knopf/Penguin.
• Giles, P. (2019). “Reorienting the Transnational: Transatlantic, Transpacific, and Antipodean.” In Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, Takayuki Tatsumi (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (pp. 31-40). Abingdon:
  Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781315163932-3
• Giles, P. (2019). Virtual War: States of Prolepsis and the Aesthetics of Violence. English Language and Literature, 65(4), 563-586. DOI: 10.15794/jell.2019.65.4.001

Projects

• 2015-2017: Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant, AUD $100,869, for “Chronometrics: Cross-temporal Approaches to Literature and Culture.”
• 2011-14: Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant, AUD$105,000, for “Antipodean America: Australasia, Colonialism, and the Constitution of U.S. Literature”
• 2002: Arts and Humanities Research Board (UK), GBP£10,000, research leave for “Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature.”

Accolades and awards

• 2021: Australian University Heads of English book prize for The Planetary Clock
• 2021: Honourable mention in annual award for Amerikastudien article: “The Crosstemporal Conundrum”
• 2014: Short-listed in General History category, NSW Premier’s History Awards, for Antipodean America
• 2012: Fellow, Australian Academy for the Humanities.
• 2012: Runner-up, British Association for American Studies annual book award, and shortlisted, European Association of American Studies biennial book award, for The Global Remapping of American Literature.
• 2003: Honourable Mention, William Riley Parker prize, for best essay of the year in PMLA: “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature.”
• 1999: Arthur Miller Prize for American Studies article by a UK citizen: “Virtual Americas” in American Quarterly (1998).

Appointments and affiliations

• Honorary Professor of English, University of Sydney
• Supernumerary Fellow, Linacre College, Oxford
• President, International Association of University Professors of English (2019- ).
• Advisory Board, Institute for World Literature (2016- ).
• Vice-President, Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association (2014-18).
• Visiting Fellow, Research School of Humanities, Australian National University, Canberra (2009).
• President, International American Studies Association (2005-7)
• Hirst Visiting Professor, Washington University, St. Louis (2005).
• Director, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford (2003-8).
• Fellow, Humanities Research Institute, Dartmouth College USA (1997).

Editorial roles

• Series editor, Anthem Studies in Global English Literatures, Anthem Press
• Co-editor, Australasian Journal of American Studies, 2015-19.
• Editor, American Literature, Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012 -16.
• Editorial advisory board, ESQ, 2011- .
• Editorial advisory board, book series, “The New American Canon,” Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture,” 2011 - .
• Contributing editor, American Literary History, 2010- .
• Advisory Board, Modern Language Quarterly, 2008- .
• Editorial Advisory Board, American Quarterly, 2003-6 .
• Associate Editor,Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, 2003-9.
• Editorial Board: Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, 2000- .
• Editorial Committee: Religion and the Arts, 1995- .

Public engagement

• The most influential American author of her generation, Toni Morrison’s writing was radically ambiguous,” The Conversation, 7 August 2019
• Radio interview about Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, 3AW Breakfast, 14 October 2016.
• Radio interview on Clive James, 2SER, 2 May 2015.
• Harper Lee’s gamble could undermine her Mockingbird,” The Conversation, 4 February 2015
• Television interview about Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, ABC TV News (Australia), 16 July 2015.
• “The Nobel Prize rewards noble writers over literary merit,” The Conversation, 15 October 2014
• Radio interview about Baz Luhrmann’s cinema, Midday, with Margaret Throsby, ABC Radio National (Australia), 30 May 2013.
• “A rose-tinted green and pleasant land” (on the London Olympics), The Australian, 31 July 2012.
• Interview with Ramona Koval on “Literature and Science,” The Book Show, ABC Radio National (Australia), 9 July 2010.
• Contributor, discussion on non-fiction of John Steinbeck, Bookworld, BBC Radio 4, March 2002.
• Contributor, “Centurions: Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath,” BBC Radio 3, 10 October 1999.