Hollis Robbins is Professor of English at the University of Utah, where she was Dean of Humanities from 2022-2024. Previously she was Dean of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University (2018-2022), Director of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University (2014-2017), and Chair of the Department of Humanities at the Peabody Institute (2011-2017). 

 

Robbins has been writing on artificial intelligence and what AI will mean for higher education since 2020. She also writes and speaks regularly on the role of university leaders in ensuring academic freedom and free speech on campus.

 

Robbins has aphantasia and writes and speaks regularly on cognitive neurodiversity and the relationship of visual imagination to poetry, aesthetics, and theories of mind.

 

Robbins is a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century African and African American and literary history and the Black press. Her books include Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (UGeorgia Press, 2020); the Penguin Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017; the Norton Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2006), also co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative (2004), co-edited with Gates. 

 

She is currently at work on a book about the poet Robert Hayden (for Penguin) and an anthology of African American sonnets (for Yale UP).