University of California, Santa Cruz

Faculty Member, Literature

Professor of Literature & Creative Writing

Humanities

About

Rob Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English in 1976 and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He taught for many years in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (which proved formative to his own development as scholar and poet of Asia/Pacific becoming) and at Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright professor, and was twice a National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. In 2001, he became a professor of transnational/ postcolonial literatures at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the summer of 2009, he team-taught a summer seminar (with Chadwick Allen) at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan on Pacific Cultural Production, counter-conversion, and the ecological framework of "Oceania."
Advisory editor for boundary 2 and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies journals among others, his earlier works include Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics appeared with Harvard University Press in 2009 and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication. A collection of cultural criticism from
Asia/Pacific (co-edited with Christopher Connery) The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization appeared with New Pacific Press/ North Atlantic Books in 2007; and Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in December, 2010.