Francisco Robles

Associate Professor
Concurrent Faculty, Gender Studies Program
English

Research Interests

Multiethnic Literatures of the United States, Latinx Literature, Migration Studies, Social Movements and literature, Poetry and Poetics. My published research falls along three lines: recovering a multiethnic literary history that is attuned to social mov

Related Courses Taught

American Migrant Communities, Queer Migrations, On the Move: Migration in American Literature, Rethinking U.S. Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Biography

My name is Francisco Eduardo Robles, and I teach and research in American Literatures of the twentieth century, focusing in particular on Multi-Ethnic American Literature.

My book, Coalition Literature: Aesthetics on the Move in Midcentury US Multiethnic Writing, examines literary and musical representations of migration, labor, and protest in the United States, spanning from the 1930s and the Popular Front into the 1980s, during the emergence of multiculturalism as an institutional tendency. Coalition Literature traces a distinctive genealogy of coalitional aesthetics focused on migration, providing significant literary theoretical and literary historical treatment of texts across several genres. Coalition Literature includes discussions of work 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 astonishing ways these authors conceive of migrancy as neither static nor statistical but as a modality that necessitates writerly innovation. The result is a lineage of coalitional aesthetics that forms a significant branch of American midcentury multiethnic writing that sustained and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies.

I am a co-convener of the Desert Futures Collective, an editor at Post45: Contemporaries, and I am currently at work 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, I have 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.

More broadly, I give talks and presentations on African American Literature, Latinx Literature, Literatures of the United States, “Southwestern” Literature, Lamentation, Elegy, and Grief, Coalitional Aesthetics, and the Popular Front and its legacies