[3] Paulson returned to Johns Hopkins University in 1984, serving as the Department Chairman from 1985 to 1991.

[3] He was a member of the editorial board of the academic journal ELH: English Literary History and was senior editor from 1985 to 2004; he served on the editorial boards of the journals Studies in English Literature; PMLA; Eighteenth-Century Studies; and the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hogarth,: “it must be the most detailed and the most deeply pondered monograph on a British artist ever written” (Michael Kitson, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790).

Of Hogarth, “in our own time, the American scholar Ronald Paulson has devoted to him the best three-volume biography written about any eighteenth-century Englishman” (Paul Johnson, Humorists).

[3] In 1988, Paulson traveled with several humorists from the United States to the Soviet Union as part of a cultural exchange.