Dr Josh Robinson

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

Professional memberships

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

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

Speaking engagements

• Dec 2016 (with Jon Pike) ‘Unjust Discrimination and Testimonial Injustice in the Academic Boycott Debate’, Dept of Philosophy, Open University
• Nov 2016 ‘The Future of Poetics’, at the School of Humanities, Kingston University, London
• Oct 2016 ‘Form(s) and History’, invited lecture in the series History and Forms of Lyric, University of Chicago
• Oct 2016 ‘The Threshold of Excess’, Poetry and Poetics Workshop, University of Chicago
• Oct 2016 ‘Speculation upon Speculation’ Inter-Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory, University of Illinois at Chicago
• Sept 2016 ‘Writing Experimental Research’, response to D.E. Oprava’s The Codex Epiphanix, at Writing Between the Lines, symposium on Creative Writing as a Research Methodology, Cardiff Metropolitan University
• July 2016 ‘Conceptual Salvage: The Concepts of Poetics and the Concepts of Poetry’,  at the triennial conference of the British Comparative Literature Association, University of Wolverhampton
• July 2016 ‘Taking Measure: Poetry, Mediation and the Broken Middle’, at the conference ‘Poetic Measure’, University of York
• June 2016 ‘The Aesthetics of Politics’, at ‘Adorno and Politics’, the First  Istanbul Critical Theory Conference, Bogazici University, Istanbul
• Mar 2016 ‘Peer-Assessment and Feedback of Divergent and Creative Tasks’ at the Higher Education Academy Teaching and Learning in the Arts and Humanities conference, Brighton
• Mar 2015 ‘Poetics, Commodity, Form’, in the seminar ‘Form as/against History’ at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, University of Washington, Seattle
• Mar 2015 ‘Reconfiguring the οἶκος: Liminality and Excess in Andrea Brady’s Poetry’, at the conference ‘New Papers in Contemporary British Poetry’ at the Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures, University of Dundee
• Feb 2015 ‘Neo-Marxist Praxis Today?’ at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford
• Dec 2014 ‘The Threshold of Excess’, at ‘A Copia of Words’, a symposium on the poetry of Andrea Brady, Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
• May 2014 ‘Remembering the Future’, at ‘The Cultural Politics of Memory’, Cardiff Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory
• Mar 2014 ‘Modernity, Capitalism, Aesthetics’, in the seminar ‘Aesthetics of Modernism’ at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, New York University
• Mar 2014 ‘Meta/Poetics in the Middle Voice: Between and beyond Poetry and the Poem’, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
• Nov 2013 ‘Value and Crisis’, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
• Apr 2013 ‘Late Modernism, Late Nationalism’, in the seminar ‘Complicity’ at the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, University of Toronto
• Mar 2013 ‘The Truth of Literary Criticism’, seminar presentation at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge
• July 2012 ‘Lyric Poetry after 9/11’, at ‘What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English’, an international conference at the University of Lincoln
• July 2012 ‘Lyric Thinking’, at ‘The Shape of Song’, an international conference on lyric at the University of Cambridge
• May 2012 ‘Adorno, Lyric, and the Poetics of the Wrong State of Things’, at the Poetry and Revolution conference at the Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre
• Mar 2012 ‘Contemporary Prospects for Poetics, or the Relevance of Adorno Today’, in the seminar ‘Innovations in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics’ at the annual conference of the ACLA, Brown University, Providence, RI
• Mar 2012 ‘The Truth of Literary Criticism’, Thomae Smithi Academia, Queens’ College, Cambridge
• July 2011 ‘Adorno, Language, Conceptuality, and the Problem of Literary Artworks’, at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum Participants’ Conference, Città di Castello, Italy
• Nov 2010 ‘Lyric and False Society: Literary Form and the Commodity-Form’, seminar presentation at the Literary Theory Seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
• Aug 2009 ‘Aesthetic Praxis’, at Adorno – 40 Years On, conference at the University of Sussex
• Nov 2007 ‘Adornos literarischer Formbegriff’, Research Colloquium, Peter Szondi-Institut für AVL der Freien Universität Berlin
• Sept 2007 ‘Beckett’s De-eroticization’, at Phenomenology of Eroticism, PhD course at Södertörns högskola, Sweden
• July 2007 Breath and Laugher in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, Twentieth Century Seminar, University of Cambridge
• April 2007 ‘The Temporality of Aesthetic Experience’, at The Time of Materiality, Spring Conference of the Theory Reading Group at Cornell, Ithaca, NY
• Feb 2007 ‘Adorno, Subjectivity, and Aesthetic Experience’, at the Criticism & Culture Seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
• Sept 2006 ‘Towards an Ethic of Experimentation’, at Pressure to Experiment, a conference on experimental poetry at the University of Southampton
• May 2006 ‘On Doing Theory’, Literary Theory Seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
• Sept 2005 ‘The Problematic Concept: Form in Heidegger and Adorno’, at the American Literature Association Symposium on Poetic Form, San Diego
• June 2005 ‘The Visual Poetic of Frank O’Hara’, at Revisualising Writing: Canvas, Page, Screen, conference at the University of Southampton
• Nov 2005 ‘Prynne’s Numbers’, Twentieth Century Seminar, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge
• Nov 2005 ‘Adorno, Commitment, Materialism’, at the Open Seminar in Radical Thought, Sheffield
• April 2005 ‘W.S. Graham and the Poetics of Loss’, W.S. Graham: What is he Like?, conference at the University of Cambridge

Committees and reviewing

• 2017–: Member of Court
• 2016–: Member of Senate

• Date
• Type
• Selected

My main current project is a monograph, The Poetics of Late Modernism, which addresses the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetic legacies of high modernism.

From 2014 I am also writing the 'Poetics' article of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory (covering work published from 2012).

Research interests

• Adorno
• literary and aesthetic form
• English-language and comparative poetics (particularly in modernist and contemporary literature)
• conceptuality, conceptual archaeologies and networks
• the experimental lyric
• negative dialectic
• Marx and critical Marxism
• value and the commodity-form
• the rhetoric of antisemitism
• philosophical aesthetics
• relationships between philosophical and literary modernism

I welcome applications from potential PhD students whose plans overlap with any of my listed interests. Informal enquiries are always welcome.

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

Past projects

• (second supervisor) Janice Sant, ‘On the Nature of Poetic Address in Blanchot, Celan and Cixous’ (submitted 2017)
• (second supervisor) Emma West, ‘The Highs and Lows of Modernism: A Cultural Deconstruction’ (completed 2017)
• (second supervisor) Calum Gardner, ‘Roland Barthes and English-language avant-garde poetry, 1970-1987’ (completed 2016)