Paul KelleherAssociate Professor

Paul Kelleher (B.A., Duke; Ph.D., Princeton) is Associate Professor of English at Emory University and the Director of Emory’s Disability Studies Initiative. His areas of specialization are eighteenth-century British literature, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies, and his teaching and research range from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century and intersect with the disciplines of moral philosophy and political theory.

Books:

His first book, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2015), argues that eighteenth-century British literature and philosophy forged a new conceptual alliance between heterosexual desire and moral feeling and tracks this entanglement of sex and sentiment through readings of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Tatler and The Spectator, Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. Making Love shows, more specifically, how eighteenth-century sentimental culture invented the idea that, in order to become a fully developed moral subject (that is, a person who transcends self-interest and genuinely “cares about” other people and future generations), every man and woman must marry and have children. Those who don’t are condemned as “selfish” people, trapped in their “perverse” “self-love.” Making Love argues, in short, that eighteenth-century sentimental culture invented conjugal reproductive heterosexuality as we know it today.

Kelleher is completing his second book, Unfashioned Creatures: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century, which explores the Enlightenment’s penchant for “universalizing” the experience of disability and for using the language of disability as a privileged way to address some of the era’s most pressing intellectual concerns. Bookended by readings of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and guided by Victor Frankenstein’s striking notion that “we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up,” Unfashioned Creatures shows how aesthetic and ethical discourses were deeply invested in disability tropes, and further, how this investment revealed the (necessary) limits of autonomy and the (sometimes surprising) benefits of vulnerability, mutability, and “imperfection.” Ultimately, Unfashioned Creatures argues for a new understanding of disability, one grounded in the literary history of the long eighteenth century: not disability as error, lack, deformity, or medicalized condition, but rather, disability as a shared task of making and remaking both self and other in the face of life’s unavoidable uncertainties.

In addition to these books, Kelleher is co-editing two volumes: one on Jane Austen and disability, the other on disability studies and the archive in early modern and eighteenth-century studies.

Journal Articles and Essays in Volumes:

“Defoe and Animals.” In Daniel Defoe in Context, edited by George Justice and Albert Rivero (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 288-296.

“Johnson and Disability.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson, edited by Greg Clingham (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 204-217.

“A Table in the Wilderness: Desire, Subjectivity, and Animal Husbandry in Robinson Crusoe.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32.1 (Fall 2019): 9-29.

“The Man Within the Breast: Sympathy, Deformity, and Moral Subjectivity in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” In Inventing Agency: Essays on the Literary and Philosophical Production of the Modern Subject, edited by Claudia Brodsky and Eloy LaBrada (Bloomsbury, 2017), 173-200. (note: this is an expanded version of 2015 article in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture)

“The Man Within the Breast: Sympathy and Deformity in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 44 (2015): 41-60.

“Defections from Nature: The Rhetoric of Deformity in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics.” In The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Chris Mounsey (Bucknell University Press, 2014), 71-90.

“Reason, Madness, and Sexuality in the British Public Sphere.” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 53.3 (Fall 2012): 291-315.

“‘The Glorious Lust of Doing Good’: Tom Jones and the Virtues of Sexuality.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 38.2-3 (Spring/Summer 2005): 165-192.

“If Love Were All: Reading Sedgwick Sentimentally.” In Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, edited by Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark (Routledge, 2002), 143-164.

• B.A., Duke University
• Ph.D., Princeton University