Paul St. Amour, Ph.D

Paul K. Saint-Amour is a Professor of English who works on Victorian and modernist literature and has special interests in the novel, law, trauma, and visual culture studies. After receiving his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from Stanford, he taught at Pomona College for ten years before joining the Penn faculty. He has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Center for the Humanities at Cornell, and the National Humanities Center. 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 Comparative Literature Studies, Critical Inquiry, Diacritics, Modernism/Modernity, Nineteenth-Century Studies, Novel, Post 45, Public Books, Theory, Culture, and Society, and Representations, whose special “Counterfactuals” issue he co-edited with Catherine Gallagher and Mark Maslan. With Robert Spoo and Joseph Jenkins he co-edited a special "Futures of Fair Use" issue of Law and Literature.

A few years ago, Saint-Amour chaired a fact-finding panel initiated by the International James Joyce Foundation (IJJF) to study the permissions history and criteria of the Estate of James Joyce and the general problem of scholarly fair use. The panel produced a detailed FAQ, "James Joyce: Copyright, Fair Use, and Permissions." Saint-Amour sits on the editorial board of the open-access journal Authorship. From 2012-13 he served as President of the Modernist Studies Association, whose fair use task force he co-chairs with Robert Spoo.