Events & News
Events: Conferences and Workshops
"Queer Journeys in North American Literature and Culture." International Conference, Claudiana, University of Innsbruck, 14 to 15 November 2025. Keynote speakers: Marlon M. Bailey (Washington University in St. Louis, USA) and Lena Mattheis (University of Surrey, UK)
"Queer Narratives of Exile, Travel, and Mobility," International Project Workshop, Claudiana, University of Innsbruck, 6 June 2024, featuring presentations from Heather Love, Ralph Poole, Benjamin Robbins, Antonio Salmeri, and Robyn Warhol
News
Benjamin Robbins (project leader) is the recipient of a 2024-25 one-month Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, supported by the Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship Endowment, to complete research on the "Queer Exile Literature of Capri and Tangier from 1900 to 69" at the University of Texas at Austin.
Robbins was the 2022-23 recipient of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellowship to conduct research on “Revisiting Interwar Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna in the Fictions of Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and John Lehmann” at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California
Presentations
2024:
Robbins, Benjamin. "Exploring the Complex Dynamics of Cultural Networks through the Digital Humanities." 19 October 2024, Austrian Association for American Studies Conference, PH Vorarlberg, Feldkirch, Austria.
———. "The Anglophone Queer Exile Narrative in Transnational Context(s)." 6 June 2024, Queer Narratives of Exile, Travel, and Mobility: International Workshop, University of Innsbruck.
———. '"She's just that international": An Intersectional Reading of the Modernist Exile Narrative.' 18 April 2024, Narrative 2024, Newcastle University, UK.
———. 'Queer Exile and the Cold War Transatlantic Novels of James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith.' 22 March 2024, The Spatial Imagination in Postwar and Contemporary American Literature and Art, University of Strasbourg, France.
2023:
Robbins, Benjamin. 'Southern Flight, Southern Return: Queer Mobilities in Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley,' 23 September 2023, Southern Trans/formations, Southern Studies Forum, Amiens and Arras, France.
———. 'Queer Exile Literature and the Mainland–Island Binary.' 31 August 2023, Queer (Second) Cities, online conference, organized by University of Freiburg and University of Surrey.
———. 'Queer Exile Literature and the Island of Capri.' 24 May 2023, project presentation, Cultures in Contact (KiK) research centre, University of Innsbruck. Invited talk.
———. 'Queering the Port Cities of Panama and Tangier in Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies and Alfred Chester's "The Foot."' 21 April 2023, Gender Studies, Masculinities Studies and Feminist Perspectives in Language and Literature, April Conference Fifteen: Humanity/Humanities, Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow.
———. 'Revisiting Weimar Berlin in the Fictions of Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and John Lehmann.' 1 February 2023, Brown Bag Talk, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
———. 'Revisiting Interwar Berlin, Hamburg, and Vienna in the Fictions of Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and John Lehmann.' 26 January 2023, USC Associates' Lecture in U.S. Cultures, Departments of English and American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Invited lecture.
2022:
Robbins, Benjamin. 'Norman Douglas and the Exile Literary Tradition.' 14 October 2022, Simposio Norman Douglas 2022, Centro Caprense Ignazio Cerio, Capri, Italy. Invited lecture.
———. ‘The Legacy of Henry James’s Transnational Novel The Ambassadors in Queer American Literature.’ 9 June 2022, Gender and American Studies: Intersectional Perspectives lecture series, University of Salzburg. Invited lecture.
———. ‘Writing the Midwest in Exile: Robert McAlmon’s Village: As It Happened through a Fifteen Year Period (1924) and Queer Detachment.’ 28 May 2022, Flyover Fictions International Conference, University of Innsbruck.
2021:
Robbins, Benjamin. Presentation of Project Results for ‘Graph Visualizations for Networks of Anglophone LGBTQ Exile Writers.’ Digital Humanities Research Centre (FZDH), University of Innsbruck. Online meeting. Invited presentation.
2019:
Robbins, Benjamin. ‘Mountain Drug Economies and the Limits of Orientalist Fantasy in Paul Bowles’s Let it Come Down (1952).’ Mediating Mountains: 46th Austrian Association for American Studies Conference, University of Innsbruck.
———. ‘Queer Exile and the Interrogation of Colonial Relations in Brion Gysin’s The Process (1969).’ Moving Geographies: European Beat Studies Network 8th Annual Conference, Nicosia, Cyprus.
———. ‘“A cannibalistic public’: The Negotiation of Scandal through Modernist Form in Norman Douglas’s South Wind (1917).’ Troublesome Modernisms: British Association for Modernist Studies International Conference, London.
———. ‘Queer Exiles in the Networked Modernist Fiction of Djuna Barnes and Robert McAlmon.’ Queer Modernism(s) III, University of Oxford.
Teaching
Robbins, Benjamin. "Migration, Border Crossing, and the History of American Film and TV." (Proseminar, Bachelor's English and American Studies , winter term 2023/24).