Hollis Robbins | |
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Born | 1963 |
Nationality | American |
Academic background | |
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Language | English |
Hollis Robbins (born 1963 [1] ) is an American academic and essayist; Robbins currently serves as dean of humanities at University of Utah. [2] Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature. [3]
Robbins was born and raised in New Hampshire. [4] [5] She entered Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16 and received her B.A. in 1983. [6] From 1986 to 1988 Robbins worked at The New Yorker magazine in the marketing and promotions department. [7] She received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1990, and subsequently enrolled as a doctoral student in the department of communication at Stanford University in 1991. [8]
After working in politics and public policy in California and Colorado, Robbins returned to school to pursue an M.A. in English literature from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1998, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003, where her dissertation focused on the literary representations of bureaucracy in 19th-century British and American literature. [9] [10]
After receiving her Ph.D., from 2004 to 2006, Robbins was an assistant professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. [11] In 2004 she also became co-director with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. [12] From 2006 to 2017 Robbins was a faculty member and then chair of the department of humanities at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University [13] where she taught a class in film music with Thomas Dolby. [14] Robbins was the director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, from 2014 to 2017. [15] From 2014 to 2018, she served on the faculty editorial board of the Johns Hopkins University Press [16] and from 2011 to 2017 served on the board of the $400M Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union. [17] She won the 2014 Johns Hopkins University Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award, [18] a 2015 Johns Hopkins University Discovery Award, [19] and a 2017–2018 fellowship from the National Humanities Center. [20]
Robbins became dean of humanities at the University of Utah on July 1, 2022. [21] Previously, from 2018 to 2022, she was dean of the school of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. [22] Her research focuses on African American history and literature. [23] In 2004, she began collaborating with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and co-edited In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative (2004). She also co-edited The Annotated 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (2007) with Gates. [24] [25] She has also written on higher education [26] [27] [28] as well as African American poetry [29] [30] and film music. [31] She is also a published poet. [32] [33] [34]
Introduction by Robbins.
Phillis Wheatley Peters, also spelled Phyllis and Wheatly was an American author who is considered the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. Born in West Africa, she was kidnapped and subsequently sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America, where she was bought by the Wheatley family of Boston. After she learned to read and write, they encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
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Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Alberta Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an American civil rights activist, journalist and former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, CNN, and the Public Broadcasting Service. Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were the first African-American students to attend the University of Georgia.
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African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.
The Bondwoman's Narrative is a novel by Hannah Crafts who claimed to have escaped from slavery in North Carolina. The manuscript was not authenticated and properly published until 2002. Some scholars believe that the novel was written between 1853 and 1861. It is one of the very first books by an African-American woman, others including the novel Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, published in 1859, and the autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, published in 1861.
Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018. Previously she was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department. In 2015, she was appointed director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation. She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016, as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.
Richard Alan Macksey was Professor of Humanities and co-founder and longtime Director of the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University, where he taught critical theory, comparative literature, and film studies. Professor Macksey was educated at Johns Hopkins, earning his B.A. in 1953 and his Ph.D. in 1957. He taught at Johns Hopkins since 1958. He was the longtime Comparative Literature editor of MLN, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He was a recipient of the Hopkins Distinguished Alumnus Award. Dr. Macksey also presided over one of the largest private libraries in Maryland, with over 70,000 books and manuscripts. An image of the room overspilling with books has been a popular internet meme in the 2010s and 2020s.
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Hannah Bond, also known by her pen name Hannah Crafts, was an American writer who escaped from slavery in North Carolina about 1857 and went to the North. Bond settled in New Jersey, likely married Thomas Vincent, and became a teacher. She wrote The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts after gaining freedom, the first published novel by an African-American woman. It is the only known novel by a fugitive slave woman.
Founded in 1947, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars is an academic program offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in writing in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. It is the second-oldest creative writing program in the United States.
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Christopher S. Celenza is an American scholar of Renaissance history and the current James B. Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also a professor of history and classics.
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Review of Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight