Visiting Speakers

David Rieff is an American non-fiction writer and policy analyst. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. He has published numerous articles in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, El Pais, The New Republic, World Affairs, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and other publications

Bruce Robbins works mainly in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of 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).

Dr. Kimberly Anne Robinson-Walcott assumed the post of editor of Caribbean Quarterly in October 2010, following a ten-year stint as editor of books and special publications at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona. Before entering the world of academic publishing she was editorial director of Kingston Publishers (now LMH Publishing) in Jamaica (1981–86, 1991–98) where she spearheaded the company’s venture into the publication of Jamaican fiction and children’s books. She is also the editor of Jamaica Journal, an academic/general-interest publication of the Institute of Jamaica whose mandate is the promotion of the country’s culture and science.

Donald Robotham was educated at the University of the West Indies and obtained his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1987. He has worked extensively in the English-speaking Caribbean as well as among the goldminers of Ghana in West Africa. His interests are in the issues of Development in both the Caribbean and Ghana, in particular, the difficulties which Developing Countries face during a period of advanced capitalist globalization. Issues of race, ethnicity, class, alternative modernities, immigration and how to overcome these divisions and unite people, preoccupy him.

HENRY ROUSSO is an outstanding research director at the CNRS. He first worked on the history of the Second World War and the post-war period, particularly on the Vichy regime and the purge. He then turned his attention to the history of collective memory and the uses of the past, a field he helped to create.

Michael Rubenstein is the author of Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame: 2010), which received the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a Distinguished book and the American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize for the Book on Literature. He is co-editor, with Sophia Beal and Bruce Robbins, of a forthcoming special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "Infrastructuralism" (2015). He is currently working on a new book, Unaccountable Growth, which examines questions of economic, infrastructural, and characterological development in recent fictions from and / or about the Global South. He offers courses on "Empire and Global English," "British and Irish Culture After 1945," "British Cinema," "Postcolonial Cinema," and "Irish Modernism," among others.

Alessandro Russo is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Bologna in Bologna, Italy.