Robert Franklin Barsky is Canada Research Chair in Law, Narrative, and Border Crossing. He is a professor in the College of Arts and Science and Associate Faculty in the School of Law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Background
Barsky was born and raised in
Montreal. He attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and after graduating moved to
Verbier,
Switzerland with the intention of pursuing a career in
skiing.
In 1985, he returned to
Canada to undertake graduate work at McGill University in Montreal, first on
Lord Byron and then, following-up on his work as a transcriber of refugee hearings, on the discourse of convention refugees for a
PhD in Comparative Literature. After the PhD he continued work for the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), before taking up a post-doc with Michel Meyer on
rhetoric and argumentation at l'Université libre de Bruxelles, in
Belgium.
Work
Barsky is the author or editor of numerous books on narrative and
refugee law ("Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law: The Flight and Plight of Peoples Deemed 'Illegal',
Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee Hearing and
Arguing and Justifying: Assessing the Convention Refugees' Choice of Moment, Motive and Host Country), on radical theory and practice ("Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism",
The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower,
Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent and an edition of
Anton Pannekoek's
Workers Councils) on discourse and
literary theory (
Introduction à la théorie littéraire, an edited volume with
Michael Holquist titled
Bakhtin and Otherness, an edited collection with Eric Méchoulan titled
The Production of French Criticism, an edited collection titled
Marc Angenot and the Scandal of History, an edited collection with Saleem Ali for www.ameriquests.org on "Quests Beyond the Ivory Tower: Public Intellectuals, Academia and the Media") and on
translation — in both theory and practice (including the translation of Michel Meyer's
Philosophy and the Passions). He has been involved with a range of journals, including
SubStance, for which he served as an editor, and he is the founder of
415 South Street, a literary magazine at Brandeis University,
Discours social/Social Discourse, and the international on-line journal AmeriQuests. His novel, "Hatched", appeared in 2016.
Barsky has been the Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professor at Yale University,
Bibliography
External links
