Biography
Robert’s research and teaching interests are North American Literature, Film, and Visual & Performing Arts, with a focus on gender, sexuality, race, and class. His dissertation examines literature, performance, art and activism in San Francisco, responding to the early part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and how we remember, and memorialize, artists and activists of the period. The larger question he is exploring in this project deals with cultural transmission; how do those elided or erased from history transmit culture into the future, and how is that history received and re-transmitted? As such, Robert’s dissertation examines affective affinities with historical figures, how their iconic legacies are transmitted, and mythmaking and fabulation as modes of resistance to erasure.