Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (2012), Upward Mobility and the Common Good (2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), and The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986). His essays have appeared in n+1, The Nation, Public Books, and the London Review of Books. He is also the director of a documentary, Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists, available at bestfriendsfilm.com.
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
Period Piece of the Present
Bruce Robbins on Raoul Peck's "The Young Karl Marx" and how it relates to the Global South....
Reading Bad
Bruce Robbins reads Merve Emre's "Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America."...
Discipline and Parse: The Politics of Close Reading
Bruce Robbins reviews Joseph North’s “Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History.”...
Intoxicating Muscle
Bruce Robbins on Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here I Am."...
Proving the Impossibility of Progress
The worst thing one can say about critical theory is that sometimes it doesn't listen. In that sense Amy Allen is faithful to her chosen tradition...
A Strange Mind: An Interview with Orhan Pamuk
The novel is about modern city life, and the characters may be poor, but they are very modern. Their problem is adjusting to the individuality of the city....
A Laboratory Sitting on a Graveyard: Greece and the Neoliberal Debt Crisis
The dream of EU membership did not mean achieving liberal democracy, as advertised, but being thrown to the wolves of neoliberal capitalism....
The Monster of Governmentality
If neoliberalism is now the name of the game, where does power really lie in our society? Does politics still matter, or is it the economy that’s calling the shots and running the show?...
The Limits of Cosmopolitanism: Ulrich Beck’s “German Europe”
In his new book German Europe, the sociologist Ulrich Beck comments on the European debt crisis....
Europe on the Brink: Habermas and the Currency Crisis
A design for the flag of the European Union (detail) by Rem Koolhaas. Source: OMA/Barbican Art Gallery via Bloomberg &...
