Paul A. Cantor is an American literary and media critic. Currently the Clifton Waller Barrett Professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia, Cantor has written on a wide range of subjects, including Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Jane Austen, Romanticism, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Leo Strauss, Samuel Beckett, Salman Rushdie, New Historicism, Austrian economics, postcolonial novels, contemporary popular culture, and relations between culture and commerce. He holds a degree from Harvard where he studied English Literature.