Paul Giles (academic)

In a 2019 address to the English Language and Literature Association of Korea, Giles suggested that civil wars might be perceived as precursors to transnational understandings of a national body. He had previously written in Transatlantic Insurrections about how the American Revolution might be understood as a civil war, and in Atlantic Republic of how American ideologies of liberty opened up divisions with the British body politic. An article by him argues that historic treatments of romanticism have, more often than not, overlooked the complicated ways in which transpacific space enters into Romantic poetics and how those aesthetic constructions have molded global political imaginaries. He has also discussed the academic institutionalization of English studies as a comparatively recent phenomenon, something that occurred many centuries after the establishment of the Classics, and he explains how the subject's fast expansion happened after World War II. In another article, he suggested a new scholarly direction in the field of American Studies as he outlined the specific challenges and opportunities that come with teaching such a course within an Australian context.

In a 2017 paper, Giles considers the relation between institutional formations of World Literature and International American Studies. Comparisons are made between International American Studies and the American Studies movement that emerged from the United States itself. His book The Global Remapping of American Literature lays out how the cartographies of the field, as an institutional category, have fluctuated across different times and spaces. According to Philip Mead “Giles has done important work reimagining North American literary history as allied rather than isolationist – revisioning American literature not as the definition of landlocked nation or exceptional homeland but as the product of transatlantic and continental traverses of forms and voices.” In Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion, Giles presents a collection of fourteen different essays spanning 1994 to 2004 on the topic of American studies, literature and religion. In his introduction for this book, he outlines the evolution of critical transnationalism as it grew in the 1980s and 1990s. He also discussed secular transformations of religious ideas in American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics, as they mold the style and substance of works by American artists, filmmakers, and writers with Catholic backgrounds. He describes how American writers have represented and mythologized Catholicism, often in oblique or indirect ways. According to James T. Fisher in the ''Modern Language Quarterly'', "Students of American Catholic literature and history will read Paul Giles's American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics with a deep sense of gratitude for his unprecedented effort to apply the insights of contemporary literary theory to an astonishing variety of Catholic texts....I was moved by the respectful intensity the author brings to his study of artists richly deserving of such elegant treatment. American Catholic Arts and Fictions is a remarkable achievement as well as a historical event." In Contemporary Literature, Jonathan Veitch wrote: “American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics is a tour de force, a magisterial study of Catholicism and the American arts. But its subject is not limited to religion . . . Giles handles complex theological questions deftly, and he does so while meeting the highest standards of cultural criticism. But more importantly, Giles has achieved the rare feat of reorienting the cultural landscape in such a way that it will be hard to read the literature of this century in quite the same manner again.”

Giles’ research interests surround the theory and practice of transnationalism and the American literature and culture. Some of his books include Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion (2010); Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (2001); Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (2006); American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (1992); Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002); The Global Remapping of American Literature (2011); and Hart Crane: The Contexts of The Bridge (1986). More recently, he has extended this transnational method to Australian literature, in Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (2019) and The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions (2021).

Giles served as the Director of Rothermere American Institute at Oxford from 2003 to 2008. He was also President of the International American Studies Association from 2005 to 2007, and took up the position of President of the International Association of University Professors of English in 2019.

Most of Giles's research has been focused upon transnational approaches to American literature and culture. Initially his research interests centered on American modernist poetry, which resulted in his first book on Hart Crane that developed out of his PhD In 1987, his interests developed into a study of secularized transformations of Catholicism and its impact on American culture, and after his return to England he continued to work on transatlantic literary relations and American culture in an international context. After his move to Australia, this comparative perspective was given a specifically transpacific dimension. His most recent work includes a comparative cultural study of temporality in the modernist and postmodernist periods.

After completing his D.Phil., Giles began his academic career as a lecturer in Humanities at the University of Staffordshire from 1985 to 1987. He then worked as an Assistant and subsequently as a tenured Associate Professor of English at Portland State University in Oregon from 1987 to 1994, after which he returned to the UK and was a Lecturer and Reader in American Studies at the University of Nottingham until 1999. He then moved to Cambridge University as a University Lecturer in American Literature and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College till 2002. He then returned to Oxford where he became statutory Reader in American Literature from 2002 to 2009, with the title of Professor. In January 2010 he moved to Australia, where he worked at the University of Sydney as Challis Professor of English until 2022. He is now a Professor of English in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne.

Giles was educated at Brentwood School in Essex, and then did his B.A in English at Christ Church, Oxford in 1979, graduating with First Class honours. He received his M.A. in 1984 and his D.Phil. in 1985 from Oxford.

In his book Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture, Giles focused on the way time is characterized in reverse forms all through modernist literature and culture. It is specifically concerned with the way in which antipodean reorientations of chronological scale reconfigure the way in which conventional temporal categories of modernism are comprehended. Philip Mead in the Australian Book Review said "Two of the bravura readings at the centre of this study are of Thomas Mann and Eleanor Dark. It's worth reading this book for these alone...There are many fascinating points of difference with Dark. There is also a fascinating interlude about H.G. Wells, his entanglements with Australia, and his The Conquest of Time (1942), with a fitting preface about Douglas Sirk's 1937 film To New Shores (Zu neuen Ufern)" In another book entitled The Planetary Clock, he talks about how time is represented in postmodern culture and how temporality manifests itself as a global phenomenon across an antipodean axis. The earlier book Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature details the paradoxical relations between English and American Literature from 1730 to 1860. It describes the way in which literary traditions are formed within each national culture and their deep dependency upon negotiations with each other's transatlantic counterpart. He detailed how going beyond the British culture's conventions were crucial for the making of American literature as a separate entity, and he describes how the consolidation of British cultural identity evolved in part as a response to the need to stifle the memory and consequences of losing the United States in the American revolutionary wars. Lance Newman in his review praised the book and said that “This is the kind of sensitively historicist approach we need to understand the period’s complex and fluid co-evolution of British and American literary cultures and national identities.” In Antipodean America: Australasia and the Constitution of U. S. Literature, Giles talks about how the formation of American literature has been affected by Australia and New Zealand since the eighteenth century. It discusses how the antipodes, as a historical fact and a philosophical idea, influenced American writers in the territory that came to be called Australasia after the British settlement of this South Pacific region. A review by Nicholas Birns in the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature stated that "Giles possesses an uncanny ability to mount a paradigmatic, discipline-altering argument while giving convincing, interesting close readings of books and careers, a feature that makes this book at once not just an interpretively dazzling performance but a book that teacher and student can have ready at hand, to consult for reference, and, since the book is written with flair and elegance, delight."