Hollis Robbins


Hollis Robbins is an American academic, scholar, and essayist in the humanities, who writes about literature, poetry, and higher education.

Career

Robbins is Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. Previously, she was Chair of the Department of Humanities at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University as well as the Director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, from 2014-2017. Robbins is an expert in the field of nineteenth-century African American literature] and co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. an anthology of African American women's writing.
Robbins entered Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16, where she studied with Julian Stanley and Richard A. Macksey and received her B.A. in 1983. She received a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1990, an M.A. in English literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1998, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003. From 2004-2006 Robbins was an Assistant Professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.
Robbins's essays on higher education have appeared in Inside Higher Education, The Chronicle of Higher Education, LA Review of Books, and The American Interest, among other journals. Robbins also writes and publishes on African American poets and on film music.  Her own poetry has been published in The Cortland Review, Mezzo Cammin, Per Contra, Boston Literary Magazine and other literary journals.
From 2014-2018 Robbins served on the Faculty Editorial Board of the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Books edited