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Peter Robinson

photograph of john robinson
  • Founder of the English Literature with Creative Writing pathway degree
  • Lead researcher in the Poetry & Poetics strand of the Modern Studies Centre.

Areas of interest

I am founder of both the English Literature with Creative Writing joint degree programme and the MA in Creative Writing. I have convened modules in modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I have also contributed lectures and seminar teaching to a variety of modules for all three years of our degree programme.

Website: Peter Robinson Poet

Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Robinson_(poet)]

Postgraduate supervision

I supervise doctoral research on both academic and creative writing topics, including successfully completed PhDs on the translation of post-war Japanese poetry, the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, Wyndham Lewis's relationship with Chatto and Windus, and travel writing in Albania, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom. I currently supervise a number of poets completing volumes of their own poetry with related research projects including one using the Mills & Boon archive in Special Collections, as well as a number of life writing projects, and ones on Ezra Pound's correspondence and the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg. 

I have overseen British Academy funded post-doctoral research undertaken by Dr Natalie Pollard, entitled Lyric Economies, which focused on the relationships between styles of address and publishing policy in twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and Matthew Sperling's Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship researching on the publishing of British and Irish poetry since 1960.

The department regularly sponsors applications to funding bodies for postgraduate and postdoctoral research and I am open to proposals within my specialist areas.I continue to have a strong interest in poetry from the entire canon of literature in English, reflected in the subjects of my critical writings, and am happy to direct postgraduate and postdoctoral research in the field of my research interests. I am also open to strong and interesting proposals in creative writing and various interdisciplinary areas connected with poetry. The department regularly sponsors applications to funding bodies for postgraduate and postdoctoral research and I am open to proposals within my specialist areas.

Research projects

My primary research interest is the writing, publishing, and reception of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry, and poetry in translation. 

Over the past few years I have published the following volumes of criticism: The Sound Sense of Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Poetry & Money: A Speculation(Liverpool University Press, 2020) and The Personal Art: Essays, Reviews & Memoirs (Shearsman Books, 2021); the following works of fiction: September in the Rain (Holland House Books, 2016) and The Constitutionals (Two Rivers Press, 2019); the following collections of poetry: Ravishing Europa (Worple Press, 2019), Bonjour Mr Inshaw (Two Rivers Press, 2020), a second edition of English Nettles and Other Poems (2022) and Retrieved Attachments (Two Rivers Press, 2023); and the following volumes of translation from the Italian: Reports after the Fire: Selected Poems of Pietro De Marchi (Shearsman Books, 2022) and, with Roberta Antognini, The Collected Poems of Giorgio Bassani (Agincourt Press, 2023). My edition of Roy Fisher's The Citizen and the Making of City appeared from Bloodaxe Books in 2022, and a collection of essays, Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work edited by Tom Phillips was published by Shearsman Books in 2021. 

I am also the poetry editor for the Reading-based Two Rivers Press and help edit the poetry for The Fortnightly Review.

Publications