Paul Hurh

Paul Hurh researches and teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature, with focus on the gothic and American romanticism, and author specializations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.  His current theoretical interests include: affect theory, new materialism, post-humanism, literary aesthetics and intellectual history.  His book, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford 2015), charts the relation between Enlightenment theories of knowledge and the development of literary terror as philosophical affect.  His current book project, Medium Paranoid: Emergent Affect in the Age of Magazines (working title), examines how the shift in print media technology to mass magazine and newspaper publication led to the emergence of specific new feelings and moods which the writers of the period captured and portrayed.  Other current projects include studies on Herman Melville’s pessimist philosophy and Edgar Allan Poe’s theorization of scale.

His essays have appeared in journals such as Nineteenth-Century Literature, Novel, and Textual Practice, as well as in collections such as Melville’s Philosophies (Bloomsbury 2017), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford 2019), and The New Melville Studies (Cambridge 2019).

Hurh regularly teaches the department’s literary analysis course and the 1660-1900 British and American Literature survey, as well as upper-division and graduate courses on American Romanticism, the American Gothic, Edgar Allan Poe, Moby-Dick, and Public Writing.