Patrick McDonald received his Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2018.  He also has a Master of Arts in English from SUNY – Buffalo and a B.A. in English from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He is the author of a recent monograph, and his other work has appeared in ESQ, Eighth Lamp, and Research in African Literatures.

Dr. McDonald is a scholar of early and nineteenth-century American literature whose work examines the residual elements from the past in nineteenth-century American culture and how writers in the period theorize the persistence of the past in the present.  His monograph Liberalism, Theology, and the Performative in Antebellum American Literature (Routledge 2023) explores the manifold literary responses to the politico-theological crisis in the decade before the Civil War. His dissertation “Aristocratic Capital” examines the prominent role that both real and imagined aristocrats play in canonical American novels and political economy from the Early Republic to the antebellum period and how each attempts to grapple with a developing capitalist economy.

He is currently working on a second monograph about nineteenth-century American encounters with and imaginings of Anatolia and an article tentatively entitled “’And hosts are sacred—house and all’: Middle Eastern Infrastructure and Divining the Secular in Clarel.”   When he’s not reading and writing, Dr. McDonald enjoys cooking, exploring Ankara, and spending time with his fiancée and cat.