Hollis Robbins (on leave 2024-2025) is a noted scholar of nineteenth-century American and African American literature, film, and poetry. Her most recent book, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition (University of Georgia Press, 2020), explores the interrelationship of influence, double consciousness, canon-formation, and poetic form. Robbins has previously edited or co-edited five books, including the Penguin Portable Nineteenth Century African American Women Writers, co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which was named one of NPR’s Best Books of 2017. She is currently working on four books: a new edition of The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, also with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; a study of the poetry of Robert Hayden for Penguin; an anthology of essays on the identification of Hannah Crafts, author of The Bondwoman's Narrative; and an anthology of African American sonnets.

Robbins has been since 2004 the Co-Director/Managing Editor of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Harvard University and has won or been involved with numerous Mellon and NEH Digital Humanities grants in support of Black Press research. She will be spending time at Harvard working on how AI tools can support Black Press research.

Previously Robbins served as Dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at Sonoma State University, where she established a new major in Native American Studies and secured over $4 million in funding for programs supporting undergraduate academic success. From 2006-2018 Robbins faculty and then chair of the Department of Humanities at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University; from 2014-2017 she was Director of Hopkins’s Center for Africana Studies. She has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center (2017-2018) was the 2014 winner of the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award.

Robbins holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University (2003); an M.A. in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder (1998); an M.P.P. from Harvard University (1990); and a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University (1983).