Francisco Robles
Associate Professor
Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Latino Studies, Concurrent Professor of Gender Studies Program; Faculty Affiliate of the Initiative on Race and Resilience
Areas of study
- African and African American
- American
- Environmental
- Gender and Sexuality
- Latinx
Education
Ph.D. Princeton
M.A. Princeton
A.B. Washington University in St. Louis
Research and teaching interests
Migration, Latinx Poetry, Contemporary Latinx Literature, Desert Studies, Twentieth Century American Literature
Biography
Francisco Eduardo Robles teaches and researches American Literatures (particularly Multiethnic American Literature) of the twentieth century.
His book, Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing, examines mid-twentieth century literary and musical representations of migration, labor, and protest in the United States. Coalition Literature traces a distinctive genealogy of coalitional aesthetics focused on migration, providing significant literary theoretical and literary historical treatment works by Zora Neale Hurston, Muriel Rukeyser, Sanora Babb, Carlos Bulosan, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, Memphis Sanitation Strike poet-activists, Tomás Rivera, and the authors included in This Bridge Called My Back. The aesthetic innovation these works display emerges from the particular methods of speaking with that they contain, whether it's overcoming exclusion by finding new ways of representing migrants through word and sound, or in the ways these authors conceive of migrancy as a modality that necessitates innovation. The lineage of coalitional aesthetics, present in American midcentury multiethnic writing, sustained and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies.
He is a co-convener of the Desert Futures Collective, an editor at Post45: Contemporaries, and he is currently working on two distinct projects: the first on Latinx poetry and its reimagining of elegy’s scalar possibilities, and the other on desert spaces in literature.
At Notre Dame, he has taught a variety of classes on topics including US Literature (especially in African American and Latinx Literature), Migration, Queer Literature and Film, Contemporary Poetry and Prose, and the debates around the Great American Novel.
Representative publications
- Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing. Stanford University Press, Post•45 Book Series, March 2025.
- “The Sense and Sound of Lamentation in Yesenia Montilla’s Muse Found in a Colonized Body.” Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Volume 8, Issue 1, Fall 2023 (published 2024): 44-62.
- “Communal Imagination and the Problem of Allegory in Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra.” Twentieth-Century Literature, Volume 68, Issue 1 (Spring 2022), Pages 53-74.
- “Lydia Mendoza’s Moving Homelands.” Latino Studies, Volume 19, Issue 2 (June 2021), Pages 164-185.
- “Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on Reading the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike.” Post45: Peer Reviewed Issue 5 (Fall/Winter 2020), “Formalism Now,” eds. Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore.
- “Jean Toomer’s Cane and the Borderlands of Encounter and Contradiction.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, Volume 45, Issue 1 (Spring 2020), Pages 27–48
