Faculty Directory
- Pronouns he, him, his, his, himself
- Title
- Distinguished Professor of Literature
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- Literature Department
- Creative Writing Program
- Affiliations Feminist Studies Department, East Asian Studies, Digital Arts and New Media
- Phone
- Website
- Office Location
- Humanities Building 1, Humanities 631
- Office Hours Spring 2024: 2-4 PM on Thursdays, or by arrangment.
- Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services
- Mailing Address
- Humanities 631, Literature Department
- Santa Cruz CA 95064
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Poetry, Asian Studies, Ocean Studies
- Courses Creative Writing (poetry); Borderlands Writing; World Pacific: Indigeneity, Oceans, Ecopoetics; Poetics of the Sublime; Bob Dylan as Poet; Rural and Urban Dialectics in the World Pastoral, San Francisco as Global City; Beat Literature and the World
Research Interests
Transnational and postcolonial literatures, especially as transformed in Asia/Pacific; Oceania and world oceans; cultural-political emergences as posited against US empire of globalization; cultural poetics of America in the Pacific and Oceania; the sublime, Longinus to Hiroshima; poetics of experimental writing, especially poetry; the poetry and cultural poetics of Bob Dylan; Beat beatitude, social and literary from Jesus to Juliana Spahr et al; "inter-Asian cultural studies" as a formation.
Biography, Education and Training
Rob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa; Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright professor and was National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Since 2001, he became a professor of American literature, creative writing, and poetics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His books of poetry and cultural criticism 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. Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication in 2010. Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued on Kindle Books in 2020. He administers two social groups on Facebook called "Beat Attitudes: World Becoming" and "Rethinking World Literature." His poems have appeared in various journals from Poetry, Ploughshares, New Republic, Jacket, and the Berkeley Poetry Review to Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, Segue Munhak, Good Times, and Korean Culture. A dual-language poetry collection in English and Chinese called When the Nikita Moon Rose appears in the Transpacific Archipelagic Poetry Series at National Sun Yat-sen University. Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu.
Selected Publications
Oceanic Becoming: The Pacific Beneath the Pavements (forthcoming Duke University Press).
Selected Exhibitions
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674033436
Selected Recordings
https://www.academia.edu/video/lBJK0l
Selected Performances
https://www.academia.edu/video/lBJK0l
