- Ph.D., Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University, 2010; M.A., Rice University; B.A., University of Texas at Austin
Dylon Robbins
Associate Professor
Cultural and theoretical production of Brazil and Cuba; African Diasporas; intellectual and cultural histories, media, cinema, and popular music
Fulbright-Hays fellow at the Cinemateca Brasileira and the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, and in Cuba at the ICAIC, the Biblioteca Nacional, and Casa de las Américas.
Dylon Robbins has published and carried out research on Brazilian and Cuban cinema and music, the documentary and materiality, Walt Disney and Sergei Eisenstein, polyrhythm and temporality, spirit possession and political subjectivity, torture, pornography, cannibalism, and anthropophagy, as well as on visual culture and war in the United States in 1898, with publications appearing in Brasiliana, Discourse, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and the Revista Iberoamericana. He has coedited a special issue of Discourse on media and materiality in Latin America with Javier García Liendo, as well as the forthcoming volume Guillén Landrián: por un cine salvaje, with Julio Ramos. His translations of essays by the Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chaui appear in the English-language anthology of her work Between Conformity and Resistance: Essays on Politics, Culture, and the State published by Palgrave Macmillan.
His forthcoming book project, Audible Geographies: Sounding Race and Place in Latin America, examines ethnographic and musicological discourse through its cinematic and literary imprint. It calls upon a selection of Brazilian and Cuban examples as case studies in a wider array of phenomena spanning Latin America and the Caribbean, while asking what they reveal about the status of sound and the audible, the state, the African diaspora, consciousness, and sociability.
He teaches courses on Latin American cultural history, race and culture in Brazil, cannibalism and anthropophagy in the Americas, and popular music in the Afro-Americas. He has held visiting professorships at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, France, and in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.