Hollis Robbins

Hollis Robbins (born 1963 ) is an American academic and essayist. Robbins is professor of English and also serves as Special Advisor for Humanities at the University of Utah; she was formerly dean of humanities. Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature and her essays focus on higher education, artificial intelligence (AI), and aphantasia.

Education and early career Robbins was born and raised in New Hampshire. She is Jewish. Her father's family were from Latvia and Lithuania. On her mother's side she is descended from Isaac Shelby, first governor of Kentucky. Her great-great uncle is Hugh Campbell Wallace, Ambassador to France under Woodrow Wilson. Another great uncle is the explorer and publisher William LaVarre.

Robbins entered Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16, where she studied with Richard Macksey and Julian Stanley. She received her B.A. in 1983. From 1986 to 1988 Robbins worked at The New Yorker magazine in the marketing and promotions department. 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.

After working in politics and public policy in California and Colorado, Robbins pursued 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.

Academic career After receiving her Ph.D., from 2004 to 2006, Robbins was an assistant professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. 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. 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 where she taught a class in film music with Thomas Dolby. Robbins was the director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, from 2014 to 2017. From 2014 to 2018, she served on the faculty editorial board of the Johns Hopkins University Press and from 2011 to 2017 served on the board of the $400M Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union. She won the 2014 Johns Hopkins University Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award, a 2015 Johns Hopkins University Discovery Award, and a 2017–2018 fellowship from the National Humanities Center.

Robbins became dean of humanities at the University of Utah on July 1, 2022. Previously, from 2018 to 2022, she was dean of the school of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. Her research focuses on African American history and literature. In 2004, she began collaborating with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and co-edited (2004). She also co-edited (2007) with Gates. She has also written on higher education as well as African American poetry and film music. She is also a published poet.

Essayist Robbins publishes essays on higher ed (and AI) and book reviews in Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other places.

Selected publications As author

As editor