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Background

Robyn Cope specializes in French Caribbean literature and culture. She is particularly interested in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing. 

Cope has made a number of contributions to the emerging field of literary food studies, including numerous conference presentations, two journal articles (“Writing Haiti Global: Food and Fascism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” and “Gagging on É����������é: Culinary Imperialism on the Island of Reunion in Axel Gauvin’s Faims d’enfance”), a book chapter (“Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food and (the) Haitian Experience(s),” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat) and a book (The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s)). Cope’s current projects focus on gendered violence and female forms of resistance in post-earthquake Haitian fiction, including literary depictions of 21st-century female heirs to the historical Haitian maroon.

Cope is affiliated faculty with the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies (LACAS) program and frequently cross-lists courses with Africana Studies. She also serves on the advisory committee for the Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity and as a BFirst mentor.

Publications

• “Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat, by Maia L. Butler, Joanna Davis-McElligatt & Megan Feifer (Eds.) (Review).” New West Indian Guide, vol. 97, no. 3–4, 2023, pp. 410–11.
• “Blue by Emmelie Prophète (Review).” World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 6, 2022, pp. 57–59.
• “Scattering and Gathering: Danticat, Food, and (the) Haitian Experience(s).” The Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Nadège Clitandre. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pp. 283-302.
• The Pen and the Pan: Food, Fiction, and Homegrown Caribbean Feminism(s). University of the West Indies Press, 2021.
• “‘We Are Your Neighbors’: Edwidge Danticat’s New Narrative for Haiti.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 98–118.

Education

• PhD, Florida State University
• MEd, Xavier University
• BA, Miami University

Teaching Interests

• Literatures of migration, including questions of authenticity, assimilation and the quest for individual self-actualization
• Post-colonial literatures, including the legacy of racialized slavery, forms of neocolonialism and Afro-diasporic peoples’ ongoing freedom struggle