Robin Brooks

About Fellow

Robin Brooks is a cultural and literary analyst who explores matters concerning Black communities in the United States and the wider African Diaspora. She is associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and her research stands at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. Brooks is the author of Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (UNC Press, 2022), which examines how contemporary writers use literary portrayals of class to critique inequalities and divisions in the US and Caribbean. The book received honorable mention for the Barbara T. Christian Literary Award from the Caribbean Studies Association and has been reviewed in several outlets, such as American Literary History, MELUS, and Journal of Working-Class Studies.

She is currently working on a book project, Death Proximity: Grief and Emotional Wellness Stories in Black Communities, about death and mortality. Engaging the field of health humanities, the book examines the subject of human death via interviews with people of African descent in a major US metropolitan area and detailed analyses of published twenty-first-century memoirs by Black authors in the United States. Her research has received support from numerous fellowships and grants, notably from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Brooks’s scholarship has reached audiences beyond the academy, and she has been featured in national and local media outlets including NPR, The Washington Post, CBS, and Ms. Magazine.

Selected Publications

• Brooks, Robin. Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022.
• Brooks, Robin. “The Old and the New: Tracing Evolving 21st Century Portrayals of the African Diaspora.” In African American Literature in Transition, edited by Maria Rice Bellamy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026.
• Brooks, Robin, ed. Black Women’s Literature: Violence & the COVID-19 Moment. Special issue, MELUS 46, no. 4 (Winter 2021).
• Brooks, Robin. “Black, Female, and Teaching Social Justice: Transformative Pedagogy for Challenging Times.” In Black Women and Social Justice Education: Legacies and Lessons, edited by Stephanie Y. Evans, Dre Domingue, and Tania Mitchell, 183–99. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019.
• Brooks, Robin. “R.I.P. Shirts or Shirts of the Movement: Reading the Death Paraphernalia of Black Lives.” Biography 41, no. 4 (2018): 807–30.