#  Hollis Robbins 

2025-2026

Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow

 

 

 



   ![Hollis Robbins](/sites/g/files/omnuum10831/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2025-11/thumbnail_HR22copy.jpg?itok=hiQ0bMZl) 

 



 





 

**Hollis Robbins** is Professor of English and Special Advisor for Humanities Diplomacy at the University of Utah, where she was Dean of Humanities from 2022-2024. Previously she was Dean of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University (2018-2022) and Director of Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University (2014-2017). She writes and speaks regularly on the role of university leaders in ensuring academic freedom and free speech on campus, as well as on AI’s growing challenges to the current structure of higher education.

Robbins is a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century African and African American and literary history and the Black press. Her books include *Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition* (UGeorgia Press, 2020); the Penguin *Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers*, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017; the *Norton Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin* (2006), also co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; and *In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative* (2004), co-edited with Gates. She is currently at work on a book about the poet Robert Hayden (for Penguin) and an anthology of African American sonnets (for Yale UP).



 

 

 



##  Fellowship Project 

In residence as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year, Robbins will be completing three book projects: *Robert Hayden*, a study of poetic influences; *Black Sonnets*, the first anthology of African American sonnets; and *Hannah Crafts: Discovered! New Scholarship on The Bondwoman’s Narrative*, an anthology of scholarship on Hannah Crafts.