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” [Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2015] and “Gagging on Égalité: Culinary Imperialism on the Island of Reunion in Axel Gauvin’s Faims d’enfance” [French Cultural Studies, 2015]), a book chapter (“Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food and (the) Haitian Experience(s),” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat [Bloomsbury, 2021]) and a book (The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s) [forthcoming, University of the West Indies Press]). Cope’s current projects focus on depictions of gender-based violence, including gang violence, in 21st century Haitian women’s writing.
Professor Cope’s teaching is informed by and rooted in two fundamentally human questions: “What is freedom?” and “How do people get it?” Her teaching specialties include literatures of migration, including questions of authenticity, assimilation, and the quest for individual self-actualization; and post-colonial literatures, including the legacy of racialized slavery, forms of neocolonialism, and Afro-diasporic peoples’ ongoing freedom struggle.
Cope is affiliated faculty with the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies (LACAS) program. She also serves on the advisory committee for the Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity. Cope is a BFirst mentor, advisor to French minors, and the organizer of the “Taste of the French Caribbean” annual open music and culinary event, hosted by CIW.
Education
- PhD, Florida State University
- MEd, Xavier University
- BA, Miami University
Research Interests
- Contemporary Afro- and Indo-Caribbean women’s writing
- Literary Food Studies
- Edwidge Danticat
- Gender and feminism(s) in the Caribbean
- Contemporary Haitian literature
