He earned his PhD in English at SUNY at Stony Brook in 1989. Paxson published his first book, The Poetics of Personification, in 1994 and is currently working on his second book, Theories Master Tropes and Imagining the Institution of English Studies. Other selected publications include "Masculinity and Its Hydraulic Semiotics in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" (forthcoming); "Theorizing Levinas' Face: Poststructuralism, Scientific Humanism and Problems in Late Medieval Personification Allegory" (forthcoming); and "The Anachronism of Imagining Film in the Middle Ages: Wegener's Der Golem and Chaucer's Knight's Tale" (2007).