Robert Doran teaches courses on nineteenth-century French literature and culture, in particular on the novel, Romanticism, Napoleon, and Paris. He also teaches courses on continental philosophy and contemporary French thought. His current research concerns philosophical aesthetics, in particular the concept of the sublime, literary theory, early French cinema (especially Jean Renoir), twentieth-century intellectual history, and historical theory. He has two monographs in progress: The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant and Revolutionary Aesthetics: The Sublime in Nineteenth-Century France. He is also the editor of a forthcoming issue of Yale French Studies devoted to the late French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

• "Mimesis, Figuration, and the Writing of History," in The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory,  ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (London: Sage Publications, 2013): 106-118.

• "René Girard's Concept of Conversion and the Via Negativa: Revisiting Deceit, Desire and the Novel with Jean-Paul Sartre,"  Journal of Religion and Literature  43.3 (Fall 2012): 36-45.

• "Mimesis and Aesthetic Redemption," in Rethinking Mimesis: Concepts and Practices of Literary Representation, ed. S. Isomaa, S. Kivistö, P. Lyytikäinen, S. Nyqvist, M. Polvinen, and R. Rossi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012): 201-225.

• "René Girard's Archaic Modernity," Revista de Comunicação e Cultura / Journal of Communication and Culture  11 (2011): 37-52.

• "Ambiguity in Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu,” Contemporary French Civilization 34.2 (2010): 167-190.
• The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957-2007, by Hayden White. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Edited and introduced.
• “Erich Auerbach’s Humanism and the Criticism of the Future,” Moderna, semestrale di teoria e critica della letteratura 11.1/2 (2009): 99-108.
• Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, by René Girard. Stanford University Press, 2008. Edited and introduced. (Portuguese translation in progress.)
• Guest Editor, SubStance 37.1 (March 2008): “Cultural Theory after 9/11: Terror, Religion, Media.”
• “Terrorism and Cultural Theory: The Singularity of 9/11,” SubStance 37.1 (2008): 3-19.
• “Literary History and the Sublime in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis,” New Literary History 38.2 (2007): 353-369.

• Sartre and Heidegger (spring 2013)
• French Social Thought (spring 2011)
• Introduction to French Literature (spring 2011)
• Hugo’s Les Misérables (fall 2010)
• Napoleon: Image, Myth, History (fall 2009)
• Romantic Orientalism (fall 2009)
• Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (spring 2009)
• The Novel in Europe: 1814-1848 (fall 2008)