Hollis Robbins (born 1963^[1]) is an American academic and essayist. Robbins serves as Special Advisor for Humanities at the University of Utah; she was formerly dean of humanities.^[2] Her scholarship focuses on African-American literature and her essays on higher ed and artificial intelligence.^[3][4]

Robbins was born and raised in New Hampshire.^[5][6] She entered Johns Hopkins University at the age of 16 and received her B.A. in 1983.^[7] From 1986 to 1988 Robbins worked at The New Yorker magazine in the marketing and promotions department.^[8] She received a master's degree in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in 1990, and subsequently enrolled as a doctoral student in the department of communication at Stanford University in 1991.^[9]

After working in politics and public policy in California and Colorado, Robbins pursued an M.A. in English literature from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1998, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003, where her dissertation focused on the literary representations of bureaucracy in 19th-century British and American literature.^[10][11]

After receiving her Ph.D., from 2004 to 2006, Robbins was an assistant professor of English at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi.^[12] In 2004 she also became co-director with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.^[13] From 2006 to 2017 Robbins was a faculty member and then chair of the department of humanities at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University^[14] where she taught a class in film music with Thomas Dolby.^[15] Robbins was the director of the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins, from 2014 to 2017.^[16] From 2014 to 2018, she served on the faculty editorial board of the Johns Hopkins University Press^[17] and from 2011 to 2017 served on the board of the $400M Johns Hopkins Federal Credit Union.^[18] She won the 2014 Johns Hopkins University Alumni Excellence in Teaching Award,^[19] a 2015 Johns Hopkins University Discovery Award,^[20] and a 2017–2018 fellowship from the National Humanities Center.^[21]

Robbins became dean of humanities at the University of Utah on July 1, 2022.^[22] Previously, from 2018 to 2022, she was dean of the school of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California.^[23] Her research focuses on African American history and literature.^[24] In 2004, she began collaborating with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and co-edited In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative (2004). She also co-edited The Annotated 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' (2007) with Gates.^[25][26] She has also written on higher education^[27][28][29] as well as African American poetry^[30][31] and film music.^[32] She is also a published poet.^[33][34][35]

Robbins publishes essays on higher ed (and AI) and book reviews in Inside Higher Ed,^[36] Chronicle of Higher Ed,^[37] LA Review of Books,^[38] and other places.

• — (2003). "The Emperor's New Critique". New Literary History. 34 (4). Johns Hopkins University Press: 659–675. doi:10.1353/nlh.2004.0010. ISSN 1080-661X. OCLC 1296558. S2CID 170513535. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
• — (2009). "Fugitive Mail: The Deliverance of Henry 'Box' Brown and Antebellum Postal Politics" (PDF). American Studies. Spring/Summer 2009. 50 (1/2). Mid-America American Studies Association: 5–25. ISSN 0026-3079. OCLC 00818197. Archived from the original on July 18, 2019. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
• — (2014). "23. Killing Time: Dracula and Social Discoordination". In Whitman, Glen; Dow, James (eds.). Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 239–248. ISBN 978-1-4422-3503-8. OCLC 1100669007. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
• — (2015). "Django Unchained: Repurposing Western Film Music". Safundi. 16 (3). South African and American Studies: 280–290. doi:10.1080/17533171.2015.1057022. ISSN 1753-3171. S2CID 143313188.
• — (2020). Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American sonnet tradition. Athens: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-5764-5. OCLC 1238066484.

• Brown, William Wells (2006). Garrett, Paula; — (eds.). The Works of William Wells Brown: Using his 'strong, manly voice'. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-530963-8. OCLC 255507609. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
• Gates Jr., Henry Louis; —, eds. (2004). In Search of Hannah Crafts: Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative. New York: Basic Civitas. ISBN 978-0-465-02714-9. OCLC 1069224792. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
• Gates Jr., Henry Louis; —, eds. (2017). The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 9-780-1431-0599-2. OCLC 1003724581. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
• Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins (2010). —; Gates Jr., Henry Louis (eds.). Iola Leroy, or, Shadows uplifted. New York: Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0-14-310604-3. OCLC 430052101. Introduction by Robbins.
• Stowe, Harriet Beecher (2007). Gates Jr., Henry Louis; — (eds.). The Annotated 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-05946-5. OCLC 213048247. Retrieved March 30, 2021.

• Works by Robbins at Open Library.
• [1] of the College of Humanities at University of Utah.
• Black Periodical Literature Project at The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
• Dracula and Social Discoordination, excerpt from chapter 23 of Killing Time by Robbins.