Robert Barsky

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Robert Barsky is a professor in the French and Italian Dept. and the English Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an expert on Noam Chomsky, literary theory, Convention refugees, immigration and refugee law, and Montreal. His biography of Chomsky entitled Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent was published in 1997 by MIT Press, and was followed in 2007 by The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, also published by MIT P.

Barsky was born and raised in Montreal. He attended Brandeis University in Boston, and after graduating moved to Verbier, Switzerland with the intention of following a career in skiing. In 1985, he returned to Canada to pursue graduate work at McGill University in Montreal, first on Lord Byron and then, following-up on his work as a transcriber of refugee hearings, on the discourse of Convention Refugees for a PhD in Comparative Literature. After the PhD he continued work for the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), before taking up a post-doc on rhetoric and argumentation at l'Université libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium.

Robert Barsky is the author or editor of numerous books on narrative and refugee law (Constructing a Productive Other: Discourse Theory and the Convention Refugee Hearing and Arguing and Justifying: Assessing the Convention Refugees' Choice of Moment, Motive and Host Country), on radical theory and practice (The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent and an edition of Anton Pannekoek's Workers Councils) on discourse and literary theory (Introduction à la théorie littéraire, an edited volume with Michael Holquist entitled Bakhtin and Otherness, an edited collection with Eric Méchoulan entitled The Production of French Criticism, an edited collection entitled Marc Angenot and the Scandal of History, an edited collection with Saleem Ali for www.ameriquests.org on "Quests Beyond the Ivory Tower: Public Intellectuals, Academia and the Media") and on translation -- in both theory and practice (including the translation of Michel Meyer's Philosophy and the Passions). He has been involved with a range of journals, including SubStance, for which he served as an editor, and he is the founder of 415 South Street, a literary magazine at Brandeis University, Discours social/Social Discourse, and AmeriQuests.