Robert F. Barsky: Guggenheim Fellow and Professor at Vanderbilt University
Barsky’s multidisciplinary research combines work in social justice, human rights, and border studies with literary and artistic insights pertaining to vulnerable persons. His books on undocumented migrants, refugees, and the milieus of Noam Chomsky and Zellig Harris have been translated into 14 languages. He has also written a novel called Hatched and, most recently, an epic poem with paintings by Susan Ker-Seymer called The Beltline Chronicles about a Lord Byron inspired poet who travels around the Atlanta Beltline seeking to recount in rhyme his many adventures and discoveries.
Robert Barsky and Susan Ker-Seymer
The Beltline Chronicles recalls great literary quests from the past, from Homer’s The Odyssey all the way up to Toni Morrison’s Paradise, an approach he has taken as well in his legal scholarship. In Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us about Vulnerable Migrants‘, written while he was a Rockefeller Resident Fellow at the Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Barsky suggests that many great quests from ‘the classics’ offer valuable insights about the flight and plight of vulnerable people.
Barsky has been a visiting professor at Yale University, the University of Northampton, the University of Memphis Law School, the Institutes for Advanced Studies in both Toulouse and Edinburgh, and the Law School of VU Amsterdam. He is the founding editor of AmeriQuests and the art/border crossing journal Contours Collaborations. Over the years, Barsky’s work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the governments of Canada, Québec, Belgium, France, and Holland.
