Robert Barsky

Professor of French, Comparative Literature, European Studies, and Jewish Studies;
Professor of Law ( Vanderbilt Law School) Faculty Director, W.T. Bandy Center; Guggenheim Fellow (2022); Rockefeller Resident (2017)

Robert Barsky works at the intersection of humanities and law, with a focus on border crossings. His forthcoming book is a collection of poetry called The Beltline Chronicles, a contribution to urban humanities and work on the Great Books. In his previous book, Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us about Vulnerable Migrants (Hart Law/Bloomsbury Press, 2021; 2023), written while he was a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Barsky suggests that many stories in the Western Tradition deemed to have enduring value offer insights into current discussions about the flight and plight of vulnerable migrants. His forthcoming book, sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, describes the complex process whereby modern international law was negotiated, beginning in Bellagio, through a treaty negotiation replete with Cold War tensions, savage wartime bombings, massive human rights violations, sensitive negotiations and amidst struggles for civil and voting rights.

Barsky is the author or editor of numerous books on narrative and law, including Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law: The Flight and Plight of Peoples’ Deemed ‘Illegal’ (2016); Arguing and Justifying: Assessing the Convention Refugees’ Choice of Moment, Motive and Host Country (2000); and Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee Hearing (1994). He is the author of two biographies of Noam Chomsky, and one of Zellig Harris, all with MIT Press. He’s the founding editor of the international open access border-crossing journal AmeriQuests, and a new journal on art and border crossing called Contours Collaborations. Barsky has been a Canada Research Chair and a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Northampton, the University of Memphis Law School, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse, France, the Law School of VU University Amsterdam, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and at the University of Edinburgh