Fonds F-189 - Paul Delany fonds

Paul Delany is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at SFU. His interests are modern British literature and cultural studies, literary theory, computers and the humanities, and renaissance and seventeenth century British literature.

He was born on July 18, 1937 in England. He married his first wife, Sheila, in the 1960s and they had 2 children. He was divorced in the 1970s. In the 1980s he married Elspeth McVeigh and they had another daughter.

Delany received a Bachelor of Commerce degree (First Class) from McGill University in Montreal in 1957, and an AM in Economics from Stanford University in 1958. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley, earning both a MA and PhD in English. His thesis title was English Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (published as British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century in 1969).

Delany worked as an economist for the Bank of Canada and for the International Labour Office from 1956-1959. After he earned his PhD he worked as an instructor and then as an assistant professor in the department of English at Columbia University, New York. In 1970 he came to SFU and joined the department of English, as an assistant professor. In 1977 he was made full professor.

Delany has published a number of books, most notably D.H. Lawrence's Nightmare: the Writer and his Circle of in the Years of the Great War (1978) and The Neo-pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth (1987). He has also edited various works on hypermedia, digital computing and the humanities, a book on Vancouver as a postmodern city, and a biography of George Gissing.

His book reviews have been published in the New York Times review of books and London Times review of books. He has also published many refereed and non-refereed articles that have appeared in scholarly journals and popular periodicals.

At SFU Delany served on a number of committees, including tenure, salary appeal, and computing. He was also departmental chair.

External to SFU, Delany was also chair of the sub-committee on post-secondary education policy, New Democratic Party of BC (1987-1993), President of the DH Lawrence Society of North America (1990-1992), Instructor, Hypertext, Toronto-Oxford Summer School in Humanities Computing (1989), Committee on Computers and Emerging Technologies, Modern Language Association (1993-1996).

In 1990 Delany was made a fellow of the Royal Society for Literature, and in 1993 he was made a fellow in the Royal Society of Canada.

Delany lives in Vancouver, BC.