Paul Douglass is Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at San Jose State University, where he is the past Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies and the Steinbeck Fellows Program. His research interests include British Romanticism (Byron Studies), Modern American Literature (Eliot and Steinbeck Studies), Literary Theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature-- through Music, Philosophy, and painterly aesthetics. He is the author of Lady Caroline Lamb: A Biography (Palgrave 2004), and co-editor, with Frederick Burwick, of a facsimile edition of Lord Byron and Isaac Nathan's A Selection of Hebrew Melodies, Ancient and Modern (University of Alabama Press, 1988). In 2007 he received the Elma Dangerfield Award of the International Byron Society for publication of new and original work related to the life, works and times of the 6th Lord George Gordon Noel Byron the Poet. In 2009 he was chosen as the President's Scholar of San Jose State University by President Jon Whitmore.

His selection of Lady Caroline Lamb's letters, The Whole Disgraceful Truth, was published by Palgrave in April 2006. Together with Leigh Wetherall, he edited The Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, published by Pickering and Chatto in 2009. This and other publications and projects are listed below in his summary of Scholarly Activity.

With Frederick Burwick (UCLA), he has also inaugurated a Romantic-Era Songs Web-Site dedicated to enabling scholars and music-lovers greater access to recordings of the Theater and Popular Songs, Catches, Airs, and Art Songs of the Romantic Period, including modern settings of Romantic-era lyrics