Paul Downes is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which was a co-winner of the MLA prize for a first book. He has also written a number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American fiction. His work explores the concepts of democracy and sovereignty as they have been instituted and imagined in the early United States and in the discourse of transnational humanitarian intervention.