Bruce Robbins

Degrees: B.A., Harvard (1971); M.A., Harvard (1976); Ph.D., Harvard (1980).

I didn’t pursue a graduate degree in hopes of changing the world. Like so many other young people in the late 60s and early 70s, I did want to change the world. But all that was vague, atmospheric, a matter of marching in occasional demonstrations. What I could see right in front of me was the absolute need to make a living and the desire to do so while having an interesting time, if possible. Also, in a time of war, I was eager to do no harm, again if possible. Inequality was present to my mind, but present in a complicated way. My parents had not been to college, and when I got to Harvard, that put me in an embattled minority, competing with other students who had major cultural advantages. What I spurred me on was the desire to compete and do well, as my parents had, not a desire for equality. It was only when I started work on my dissertation that my identification with my grandparents kicked in. They had had no education at all. One grandfather had died in an industrial accident. My grandmother had come to America to escape life as a servant. I wrote my dissertation and my first book about servants.

I wrote my dissertation while living in Europe and considering the prospect of exile--or expatriation, if I chose to consider life in Europe a choice rather than an accident. I was inspired by Edward W. Said’s writings on exile as a model for the intellectual. The next books I wrote (back in the US by then) were about intellectuals, professionalism (seen as a defensible career choice even on the left), and cosmopolitanism. I addressed cosmopolitanism first of all as distance for nationalism and militarism, but also as a vehicle for global economic justice.

My organized efforts on behalf of the Palestinian cause began in 2002, when I collaborated (with the physicist Alan Sokal) on an "Open Letter of American Jews to Our Government" that called for cutting off all American aid to Israel if Israel would continue not to recognize the relevant United Nations resolutions.  The "Open Letter" was published in the New York Times with over 4000 signatures, translated around the world, and re-published in 2006.

In 2014 I was co-proposer of Modern Language Association Resolution 2014-1, calling on the US Department of State to contest Israel’s denials of entry to the Palestinian West Bank to United States academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.  The resolution gained the support of an overwhelming majority, 1500 of the 2500 votes cast, though the required 10% of members did not vote.
In 2013 I directed a documentary film entitled Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. My short documentary "What Kind of Jew Is Shlomo Sand?" was released by Mondoweiss in the spring of 2020.

Recent Projects
Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford UP, 2025) won the René Wellek Award of the American Comparative Literature Association for best monograph. Who’s Allowed to Protest? came out from Melville House in 2026.Teaching Politically, a collection of essays co-edited with May Hawas, came out from Fordham UP in the same year. Why Read Edward Said Now? is forthcoming from Polity Press in early 2027. I have also published essays in The Nation, The Baffler, n+1, Public Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among other journals. I am also the author of Criticism and Politics, again published by Stanford, which came out in 2022.

Past Projects
Previous books include Cosmopolitanisms, co-edited with Paulo Horta, which was published by NYU Press in July 2017, and The Beneficiary, published by Duke UP in December 2017. He is also the author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Duke, 2012), Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993) and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke pb 1993). I edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (Minnesota, 1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (Minnesota, 1993), and co-edited (with Pheng Cheah) Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minnesota, 1998) and (with David Palumbo-Liu and Nirvana Tanoukhi) Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture (Duke, 2011). I was co-editor of the journal Social Text from 1991 to 2000.