Dr Josh Robinson

(they/them)

Publication

• Date
• Type

Research

My research brings literary and philosophical scrutiny to bear on the concepts and categories with which we think, argue and explain. My monograph, Adorno's Poetics of Form (SUNY Press, 2018) reveals many of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the apparently common-sense concepts of literary and poetic form, and in doing so accounts for the way in which 'form' is frequently used as a kind of bridge or portal between the literary work and the worlds with which it interacts. I have also theorized the often surprising ways in which the recent resurgence of interest in philosophical speculation intersects with the financial and economic crisis that has been unfolding since 2008–9, and drawn attention to the increasing conceptual weight that the term ‘poetics’ is asked to carry, identifying a category crisis that remains a concern of my work.

My recent and forthcoming work further advances these explorations, including through a literary and philosophical examination of the increasing complexity of the concept of mediation, and an investigation of the resources and challenges for contemporary literary studies presented by the work of the first-generation thinkers of the Institute for Social Research or 'Frankfurt School'.

I am also an active translator, particularly of critical and cultural theory. My translation of Robert Kurz's Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus, an 800-page critical counter-history of capitalism, is forthcoming from MCM' under the title of Satanic Mills.

Teaching

I endeavour to make the classroom into a space in which students feel supportively challenged to question what they thought they knew. The measure of my success is not in module 'evaluations' or even necessarily in the work students produce for assessment (although I continue to be surprised by the quality of work that students are able to produce), but in the changes that students make to their lives and to their worlds, sometimes years or decades later, as a direct or indirect consequence of something that we worked through together.

I currently teach one final-year module, 'American Poetry after Modernism', in which students encounter a breadth of twentieth-century American experimental and avant-garde poetic traditions, and a second-year module, 'Modernism and the City', in which students explore urban modernisms through engagement with a variety of literary, theoretical, cinematic, artistic and architectural works; this module engages explicitly with Cardiff’s civic space, in particular its architectural history and the paintings and sculptures of the collections of the National Museum.

My current and recent teaching also includes contributions to 'Reading Up-Close', a first-year course teaching advanced close-reading practices; 'Star-Cross'd Lovers', which asks students to reflect on the relationships between writing, desire and identity; and Research Methods for master's students.

Biography

I came to Cardiff as a Lecturer in 2013, prior to which I was a Research Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge. I completed my graduate studies at the Faculty of English in the University of Cambridge, during which I also spent time as a visiting Research Fellow at the Szondi Institute for General and Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Honours and awards

2008– Affiliated Professor, University of Haifa, Israel

2011–13 Research Fellow, Queens' College, Cambridge

2007–11 Visiting Research Fellow at the Szondi Institute for General and Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin

Professional memberships

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Active memberships include: American Comparative Literature Association; British Comparative Literature Association; British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies; Marxist Literary Group; University and College Union

Academic positions

• 2011–13: Research Fellow, Queens' College, Cambridge
• 2007–11: Visiting Researcher, Szondi Institute for General and Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin

Committees and reviewing

• Referee for Columbia UP, Cambridge UP, Edinbugh UP, SUNY Press, Bloomsbury Academic
• Referee for journals including British Journal of Aesthetics, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
• 2025–: Reviewer, Polish National Science Centre
• 2022–: Secretary, British Comparative Literature Association (Committee Member since 2019)
• 2017–: Outer International Assessment Board, Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme
• 2016–: Peer Review College, Arts and Humanities Research Council
• 2015–: International Editorial Board, Intersectional Perspectives (formerly Assuming Gender)
• 2014–: Reviewer, DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)
• 2013–: Editorial board, Theory, Culture, Politics (Rowman and Littlefield) 
• 2016–22: Member of University Senate

Supervisions

I am interested in supervising doctoral and postdoctoral projects in the following areas:

• Adorno
• literary and aesthetic form
• English-language and comparative poetics (particularly in modernist and contemporary literature)
• conceptuality, conceptual archaeologies and networks
• The Experimental Lyric
• comparative literature
• negative dialectic
• Marx and critical Marxism
• value and the commodity-form
• Antisemitism
• Philosophical Aesthetics
• relationships between philosophical and literary modernism

Current supervision

Tom Davies

Past projects

• ‘One-Dimensional Trans: Models, Surrogates, Rapporteurs’
• ‘Duplicitous Desire: John Dewey and the Potential of Poetry’
• ‘Pink Light and Iron: Epistemo-Critical Writing in Walter Benjamin and Philip K. Dick’
• ‘An Aesthetic Relational Worldview: A Study in the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead’
• ‘The Weird History of USAmerican Fascism: A Guide (1979-2019)’
• ‘On the Nature of Poetic Address in Blanchot, Celan and Cixous’
• ‘The Highs and Lows of Modernism: A Cultural Deconstruction’
• ‘Roland Barthes and English-language avant-garde poetry, 1970-1987’