Robyn Creswell

Robyn Creswell is a critic, translator, and scholar specializing in Arabic literature and comparative modernisms. His dissertation is a historical critique of Arabic modernist poetry, a movement that flourished in Beirut between 1955 and 1975 and which radically redefined the parameters of Arabic poetry.  Among the writers whose work Professor Creswell is particularly drawn to studying is Syrian poet Adonis.

He received a B.A. from Brown in 1999 and earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature at New York University in 2011. He published a translation, from French, of Abdelfattah Kilito’s novel The Clash of the Images (New York: New Directions, 2010), and has written reviews and essays for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, n+1, and Modernism/Modernity. In addition to teaching at Brown, Professor Creswell will continue to serve as the poetry editor for The Paris Review, a post he’s held since 2010.

Currently, he is hoping to finish a novel and will soon be working on a text for the Library of Arabic Literature, an NYU Abu Dhabi project to publish translations of the great works of classical Arabic literature. He will be translating Fusul al-Tamathil fi Tabashir al-Surur (Copious Figures on the Harbingers of Happiness) a ninth-century text about wine, poetry, and hangovers.