About Paul C. Jones

Born and raised in Arkansas, I earned my B.A. and M.A. degrees in English at the University of Arkansas. I completed my doctoral work in English at the University of Tennessee in 1999. After teaching at other institutions in South Carolina and Michigan, I joined the faculty of the English Department at Ohio University in 2002.

The bulk of my academic writing has focused on the work American writers of nineteenth-century, but I've also written about twentieth-century and contemporary ones. Authors who have been the subject of my work include both well-known and obscure writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier, Grace Greenwood, William Gilmore Simms, Evelyn Scott, Anne Tyler, Ellen Glasgow, Michael Cunningham, and Ellen Gilchrist. 

​My most recent book, Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in the summer of 2022 and was recently awarded the 2022 Patrick F. Quinn Award for outstanding monograph published on Poe by the Poe Studies Association. 

My first book, Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2005 and was awarded the Nancy Dasher Award by the College English Association of Ohio. My second book, Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011.

I was interviewed for the public radio program (podcast) BackStory with the American History Guys about Edgar Allan Poe's fiction for an episode entitled "American Horror Story." You can hear that episode here.