Timothy Donahue

542 O’Dowd Hall
tdonahue@oakland.edu

Associate Professor of English
Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

I'm an associate professor of English at Oakland University, where I teach courses on American literature, broadly considered, and on the theories and methods of literary studies.

My research focuses on nineteenth-century literatures of the U.S. and the Americas. In my current book project, "Burdened by Comparison: A Translation History of Sovereignty," I examine political modernity in North America's nineteenth-century borderlands by tracking how ideas about authority, autonomy, and governance travel across languages, times, and setter-Indigenous distinctions. I'm also beginning a second project that explores the cultures of abolition and Reconstruction from a hemispheric perspective. These projects are interdisciplinary, informed by work in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, hemispheric studies, political theory, and Indigenous, Latinx, and African-American studies. Other interests include the history and theory of the novel, public humanities, and the work of the Detroit activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs.

Publications

"Civility and/or Social Change?" Public Books, February, 2025.

“Emerson, Martí, and a Cosmopolitanism for the Americas.” The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Christopher Hanlon, Oxford UP, 2024, pp. 107-124.

“Melville’s Quixoticism and the Modern World-System.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 54, no. 3, 2021, pp. 425-443.

“The Apocalyptic Fury of the Civil War.” Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture, edited by John Hay, Cambridge UP, 2020, pp. 134-146.

“Styles of Sovereignty: Parataxis, Settler-Indigenous Difference, and the Transnationalisms of the Great Basin.” American Literary History, vol. 32., no. 1, 2020, pp. 22-45.(Winner of the 2021 Marian P. Wilson Award for Meritorious Article by Oakland University College of Arts and Sciences Faculty)

Invited Review of Hemispheric Imaginations: North American Fictions of Latin America, by Helmbrecht Breinig, and The Pan American Imagination, by Stephen M. Park. Journal of American Studies, vol. 53, no. 1, 2019, pp. 287-290.

“Joaquín’s Head: Theatrical Address, Public Punishment, and Novelistic Politics in the U.S.- Mexico Borderlands.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 4, no. 2, 2016, pp. 391-417. (Winner of the 2017 Marian P. Wilson Award for Meritorious Article by Oakland University College of Arts and Sciences Faculty).

Selected Courses

ENG 1500: Literature of Ethnic America
ENG 2100: Introduction to Literary Studies
ENG 2500: American Literature
ENG 3410: American Literature 1820-1865
ENG 3420: American Literature 1865-1920
ENG 3500: Borderlands: The North American West in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature
ENG 4980: Mark Twain, America, and the World
ENG 4980: Grace Lee Boggs and American Literature
ENG 5200: Methods and Context of Literary Analysis
ENG 5300: Essays, Genres, and Publics
ENG 5904: Novel Theory and the Americas
ENG 6841: Realism in America