Our Faculty

headshot of Robyn Cope

Robyn Cope

Associate Professor

Romance Languages and Literatures

Background

Robyn Cope specializes in French Caribbean literature and culture. She is particularly interested in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing. 

Cope has made a number of contributions to the emerging field of literary food studies, including numerous conference presentations, two journal articles (“Writing Haiti Global: Food and Fascism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” and “Gagging on Égalité: Culinary Imperialism on the Island of Reunion in Axel Gauvin’s Faims d’enfance”), a book chapter (“Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food and (the) Haitian Experience(s),” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat) and a book (The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s)). Cope’s current projects focus on gendered violence and female forms of resistance in post-earthquake Haitian fiction, including literary depictions of 21st-century female heirs to the historical Haitian maroon.

Cope is affiliated faculty with the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies (LACAS) program and frequently cross-lists courses with Africana Studies. She also serves on the advisory committee for the Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity and as a BFirst mentor.

Publications

  • “Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat, by Maia L. Butler, Joanna Davis-McElligatt & Megan Feifer (Eds.) (Review).” New West Indian Guide, vol. 97, no. 3–4, 2023, pp. 410–11.
  • “Blue by Emmelie Prophète (Review).” World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 6, 2022, pp. 57–59.
  • “Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food, and (the) Haitian Experience(s).” The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège Clitandre. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 283-302.
  • The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction, and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s). University of the West Indies Press, 2021.
  • “‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 98–118.


Education

  • PhD, Florida State University
  • MEd, Xavier University
  • BA, Miami University

Teaching Interests

  • Literatures of migration, including questions of authenticity, assimilation and the quest for individual self-actualization
  • Post-colonial literatures, including the legacy of racialized slavery, forms of neocolonialism and Afro-diasporic peoples’ ongoing freedom struggle

Curriculum Vitae

Curriculum Vitae