Research

Dr. Robinson’s research has been in modernism, specifically on the American poet H.D. His PhD dissertation discussed H.D.’s personal occult mythology as formulated in her then-unpublished work Majic Ring and its application to her long poem Trilogy. At the same time that he was working on his dissertation, he served as research assistant to the editor of the scholarly edition of Majic Ring, working extensively on the annotations.

Since then, he has been involved to varying degrees with other editions of H.D.’s archival work. His current major project is editing, with Dr. Demetres Tryphonopoulos (UNB), an annotated scholarly edition of H.D.’s Hirslanden Notebooks. Other archival work he is doing involves examining source material for H.D.’s late poetry and prose, particularly focusing on the works of French occultists who were major influences on her late thinking.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Robinson’s current research interest is in understanding the deep and complex connections between the occult and modernist writing. Recently, this concern has led him to consider the relationship between esotericism, gender, and sexuality within modernist writing communities and the broader intellectual communities they are connected with.