Assistant Professor
Email: patrick.mcdonald@bilkent.edu.tr
Phone: +90 (0312) 290 31 13
Office: G-113A
Full CV
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 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 monograph entitled “Half-Married” which examines the everyday performances—weddings, auctions, trials, and contracts—that underwrite American liberalism in the 1850s and how the decade’s fiction theorizes the liberal state’s reliance on performativity. He is also finalizing “Caring beyond Words,” an article that examines the connection between sentiment and the law in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s novel The Hidden Hand.