Robin Brooks

  • Director of Graduate Studies & Associate Professor

Dr. Robin Brooks is an associate professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century literature, particularly African-American, Caribbean, African, and American multiethnic literatures, as well as Black feminist theory, postcolonial studies, digital humanities, higher education management, and education policy.

Her first book manuscript is Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (UNC Press), and it examines how writers use literary portrayals of class to critique inequalities and divisions in the U.S. and Caribbean. She has traveled throughout the Caribbean, and she spent a fellowship year abroad in Jamaica performing research for the book. Her second book will examine contemporary African American autobiographies and memoirs.

Professor Brooks holds a PhD in English from the University of Florida and an MA in Afro American Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Upon graduating from Wisconsin in 2005, she taught full-time for a few years before returning to graduate school in 2009 for her PhD. While at the University of Florida, she held the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, a five-year graduate fellowship.

Additionally, Dr. Brooks is a proud native of Miami, Florida. After receiving the International Baccalaureate Diploma from North Miami Senior High School, she attended Florida State University on a Florida Bright Futures Scholarship where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa a year early with a BA in English in 2003. Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of San Diego and a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of South Florida. For the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in residence at Emory University.

Areas of Specialization

  • 20th & 21st Century African-American, Multi-Ethnic, Caribbean & African Literatures 
  • Inequality and Social Justice 
  • Education Policy
  • Black Feminist Theory 
  • African Diaspora Studies 
  • Digital Humanities
  • Cultural Studies 
  • Higher Education Management 
  • Postcolonial Studies 
  • Working-Class Studies 

Education & Training

  • PhD, University of Florida
  • MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • BA, Florida State University