People: Owen Robinson (BA, PhD Essex)

Senior Lecturer

room: 5A.137
tel: 01206 872617
e-mail: orobin (non-Essex users should add @essex.ac.uk to create full e-mail address)

Owen Robinson has been a Lecturer in U.S. Literature in the Department since 2003, having gained his Ph.D here in 2002.  Specialising in writing of the U.S. South, he is the author of Creating Yoknapatawpha: Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction (Routledge, 2006), and several journal articles and book-chapters on William Faulkner, George Washington Cable, and New Orleans.  With Richard Gray, he has co-edited A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American South (Blackwell, 2004), and he is co-editor of the American Literature section of the Blackwell online journal Literature Compass.  He is currently working on writing centred on New Orleans, as part of the AHRC-funded project American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography, based in the Department: this work in part considers that city and the U.S. South in the context of more transnational understandings of ‘America.’  He is also continuing to work on Faulkner's fiction, having recently contributed a chapter to A Companion to William Faulkner (ed. Richard C. Moreland, Blackwell, 2007), and presented on Faulkner and New Orleans as an invited speaker at the 2008 Faulkner and Yoknaptawpha Conference in Mississippi.

Owen would welcome research proposals on any aspect of U.S. literature, but particularly Southern writing, William Faulkner, New Orleans, African American writing, and post-war U.S. fiction; he is also interested in literary geography, and Bakhtinian and reader-response theory.