Robyn Creswell
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University

John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Spring 2016

Robyn Creswell earned his PhD in comparative literature from New York University in 2012. He taught at Brown University from 2011 to 2014, after which he became an assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University. Creswell’s research focuses on modern English, French, and Arabic poetry, specifically the intellectual history of the modern Middle East, theories and practices of translation, and contemporary poetry.
The poetry editor of the Paris Review, Creswell is the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Clash of Images (2010) and Sonallah Ibrahim’s That Smell and Notes from Prison (2013). His essays and reviews have been published in Harper’s, New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. A former fellow of the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, Creswell received the 2013 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. His work has been supported by Brown University’s Humanities Initiative Grant, the American Council of Learned Societies, PEN Translation Fund, and the MacDowell Colony.

Project Description

Ruins of Modernity: A Study of Arabic Poetry in Six Tropes

In his Academy project, Creswell explored the idea of modernity in the work of Arab poets since World War II. Arab poets are public intellectuals, and they expected to speak on politics and history as well as aesthetic matters. Arabic poetry and poetics, Creswell argues, are cultural sites where the most sophisticated arguments about modernity and tradition in the contemporary Middle East play out. As the chief custodians of their patrimony, poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, and Abdellatif Laabi shape the preservation and renewal of their literary heritage. With each chapter devoted to a trope of Arabic modernity—Ruins, Radio, City, Wine, Exile, and Farewell—Creswell’s book is a work of both intellectual history and literary criticism.

Academy Activities

17 Mar 16

Arabic Poetry and the Project of Modernity

In popular accounts as well as UN Development reports, the Arab world appears uniquely resistant to modern ways of being and styles of thought. Yet debates about modernity have long been at the center of intellectual life in the region, and the most sophisticated versions of these debates happen in ...

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15 Mar 16

Fellow Spotlight: Robyn Creswell

Robyn Creswell is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University. Creswell’s research focuses on modern English, French, and Arabic poetry, specifically the intellectual history of the modern Middle East, theories and practices of translation, and contemporary poetry. The poet ...

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