Bruce Robbins | |
---|---|
Born | 1949 Brooklyn, NY |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Literary scholar, author and academic |
Title | Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities |
Awards | Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship |
Academic background | |
Education | B.A., History and Literature M.A., English and American Literature and Language Ph.D., English and American Literature and Language |
Alma mater | Harvard College Harvard University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Columbia University |
Bruce Robbins is an American literary scholar,author and an academic. He is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. [1]
Robbins's research interests include book projects on the history of literary representations of atrocity and the connections between criticism and politics,along with cosmopolitanism,intellectuals,nineteenth and twentieth century fiction,and literary and cultural theory. He has authored several books including The Servant's Hand:English Fiction from Below,Feeling Global:Internationalism in Distress,and The Beneficiary. [2] He has also directed two documentaries,Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists [3] and What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?. [4]
Robbins worked as co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 until 2000 and is editor-in-chief of the online journal politicsslashletters.org.
Robbins graduated in History and Literature from Harvard College in 1971. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 1976 and 1980,respectively. [1]
Robbins started as an assistant of Modern English Literature at University of Geneva and then taught at University of Lausanne from 1981 until 1984 as a maître-assistant in American Literature. In 1984,he joined Rutgers University as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor and to Professor in 1987 and 1992,respectively. He was promoted to Professor II in 2000. In 2001,Robbins joined the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. [1]
Robbins's research centers on cosmopolitanism,intellectuals,the state,the public sphere,and fiction since the nineteenth century,along with political theory,Marxism,and critical social theory. His recent work includes book projects on the history of literary representations of atrocity and the connections between criticism and politics.
Robbins published his first book,The Servant’s Hand:English Fiction from Below in 1986. The book discusses regarding the presence of servants in the margins of novels that are not written for or about them. A review by Keith Embley stated that "The Servant's Hand attempts to extract the political sub-text of its chosen literary material". [5] Gerald C. Sorensen described the book as a "narrative that offers us a way of seeing",and that "in these margins of the nineteenth century realist novel something of importance is inscribed". [6]
The book was also reviewed as "a provocative and stimulating work and an exciting addition to this field of scholarly endeavor", [7] and as "a work of innovative literary and cultural history". [8]
Robbins published his second book,Secular Vocations:Intellectuals,Professionalism,Culture in 1993. The book makes a case in favor of professionalism,which was not a popular argument in the midst of the Culture Wars of the 1990s. According to Publishers Weekly,Robbins "offers an original defense of academic cultural criticism as practiced today" and contended that "university-based intellectuals can contribute valuable critical insight and political awareness to a likewise professionalized public". [9]
Although Robbins had been co-editor of the journal Social Text in 1996,when it was hoaxed by the physicist Alan Sokal,Robbins collaborated with Sokal in 2002 on a project titled An Open Letter of American Jews to our Government, [10] which protested American support for Israel. The Open Letter was published in The New York Times.
Robbins's involvement with the Israeli and Palestinian politics has also resulted in two documentary films. “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists”was released in 2012, [11] and "What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?" was released in 2020. [4]
Robbins' book,Upward Mobility and the Common Good brings the state into the subject of literature and class. The book was reviewed as "an important and committed study" and a "highly readable and enlightening book". According to Ina Habermann,"The author's ambivalence about his own argument makes it,if anything,more compelling". [12]
A review by John Brenkman stated that "Robbins's argument is not only unpersuasive but also implausible",and that "there is considerable ambivalence and conceptual uncertainty in Robbins's perspective on the welfare state". [13]
Robbins has also focused on the subjects of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. This work has resulted in a trilogy of books including Feeling Global:Internationalism in Distress,Perpetual War:Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence,and The Beneficiary. The latter was published in 2020 and was reviewed as succeeding "brilliantly in focusing its readers on the urgencies of our time". One review states that "Robbins uncovers a hidden tradition of economic cosmopolitanism". [14]
According to Christina Lupton,"in The Beneficiary,Bruce Robbins wants to make room for the note of guilt in our songs of gratitude. Who is a beneficiary? Robbins's answer is that it is probably you". She also stated that "if Robbins has his way,we'll not only still be thinking globally —we'll live in a world that makes doing so tolerable." [15]
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction. He has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship. As of 2023, Powers has published thirteen novels and has taught at the University of Illinois and Stanford University. He won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory.
Rootless cosmopolitan was a pejorative Soviet epithet which referred mostly to Jewish intellectuals as an accusation of their lack of allegiance to the Soviet Union, especially during the antisemitic campaign of 1948–1953. This campaign had its roots in Joseph Stalin's 1946 attack on writers who were connected with "bourgeois Western influences", culminating in the "exposure" of the non-existent Doctors' Plot in 1953.
Nancy Katherine Hayles is an American postmodern literary critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic literature, and American literature. She is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature, Literature, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.
Jayne Anne Phillips is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer who was born in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
John R. Keene Jr. is an American writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.
Christopher Abani is a Nigerian American and Los Angeles- based author. He says he is part of a new generation of Nigerian writers working to convey to an English-speaking audience the experience of those born and raised in "that troubled African nation".
Derek Attridge FBA is a South African-born British academic in the field of English literature. He is Emeritus Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, having retired from the university in 2016, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Attridge undertakes research in South African literature, James Joyce, modern fiction, deconstruction and literary theory and the history and performance of poetry. He is the author or editor of thirty books, and has published eighty articles in essay collections and a similar number in journals. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Leverhulme Research Professorship, and Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and The Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and All Souls and St. Catherine's Colleges, Oxford. Among the visiting positions he has held have been professorships at the American University of Cairo, the University of Sassari, the University of Cape Town, Northwestern University, Wellesley College, and the University of Queensland.
Professor Patricia Waugh is a literary critic, intellectual historian and Professor of English Literature at Durham University. She is a leading specialist in modernist and post-modernist literature, feminist theory, intellectual history, and postwar fiction and its political contexts. Along with Linda Hutcheon, Waugh is notable as one of the first critics to work on metafiction and, in particular, for her influential 1984 study, Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction.
Jay Clayton is an American literary critic who is known for his work on the relationship between nineteenth-century culture and postmodernism. He has published influential works on Romanticism and the novel, Neo-Victorian literature, steampunk, hypertext fiction, online games, contemporary American fiction, technology in literature, and genetics in literature and film. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English and director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Paul Antony Tanner was a British literary critic of the mid-20th century, and a pioneering figure in the study of American literature. He was a fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he taught and studied for 38 years, from 1960 until his death in 1998.
Nina Baym (1936–2018) was an American literary critic and literary historian. She was professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1963 to 2004.
Susan Osborn is an American writer, editor, and a scholar of modern British and Irish literature and rhetoric and composition who teaches in the English department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, on a part-time basis as a lecturer. She founded and serves as director of the Princeton Writing Center, a privately owned operation, unaffiliated with Princeton University.
Aimee Parkison is an American writer known for experimental, lyrical, feminist fiction. She has won the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize as well as the first annual Starcherone Fiction Prize and has taught creative writing at a number of universities, including Cornell University, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Oklahoma State University.
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism is 2003 book on literary history, criticism and theory by Brent Hayes Edwards.
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Faye Hammill FRSE is a professor in the University of Glasgow, specialising in North American and British modern writing in the first half of the twentieth century, what is often called 'middlebrow'. Her recent focus is ocean liners in literature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2021).
Timothy Miles Brennan is a cultural theorist, professor of literature, public speaker, and activist. He is known for his work on American imperialism, the political role of intellectuals, Afro-Latin music, and the problem of the "human" and the humanities in an age of technoscience.
Julian Lane Moynahan was an American academic, librarian, literary critic, poet, and novelist. Much of Moynahan's academic work was focussed on D. H. Lawrence and Vladimir Nabokov. He was active as a book reviewer for leading publications on both sides of the Atlantic and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.
Robert Boyers is an American literary essayist, cultural critic and memoirist. Currently, he is the editor of the quarterly magazine Salmagundi, Professor of English at Skidmore College, and Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, which he founded in 1987.