Senate Faculty

Research Interests

Transnational and postcolonial literatures, especially as transformed in Asia/Pacific; Oceania and world oceans; cultural-political emergences as posited against US empire of globalization; cultural poetics of America in the Pacific and Oceania; the sublime, Longinus to Hiroshima; poetics of experimental writing, especially poetry; the poetry and cultural poetics of Bob Dylan; Beat beatitude, social and literary from Jesus to Juliana Spahr et al; "inter-Asian cultural studies" as a formation.

Biography, Education and Training

Rob Sean Wilson is a Western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa; Korea University in Seoul as a Fulbright professor and was National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University and National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Since 2001, he became a professor of American literature, creative writing, and poetics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His books of poetry and cultural criticism include: Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From 'South Pacific' to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication in 2010. Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued on Kindle Books in 2020.  He administers two social groups on Facebook called "Beat Attitudes: World Becoming" and "Rethinking World Literature." His poems have appeared in various journals from Poetry, Ploughshares, New Republic, Jacket, and the Berkeley Poetry Review to Bamboo Ridge, Tinfish, Segue Munhak, Good Times, and Korean Culture. A dual-language poetry collection in English and Chinese called When the Nikita Moon Rose appears in the Transpacific Archipelagic Poetry Series at National Sun Yat-sen University in fall 2021.  Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu.

Rob Sean Wilson has a book-length poetry book forthcoming in the "Transpacific and Archepelagic Poetry & Poetics" series When the Nikita Moon Rose (Kaohsiung, Taiwan:  National Sun Yat-sen Press, 2021) in English with Chinese translations by Tee Kim Tong, Melody Yunzi Lee, Chih-min Wang; as well as a collection of cultural and literary studies co-edited with Kim So-Young of Korea and Serena Chou of Taiwan called Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture:  Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene (London & New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In terms of international academic service, he has been appointed to a two-year term to the Advisory Board for the Institute of European and American Studies at Academia  Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan; and to a two-year term on the Asia/Oceania Regional Faculty Advisory Group to generate "Global Engagements" now that UCSC has become a new member of the Asia Pacific Research Universities consortium comprised of leading universities from 19 economies of the Pacific Rim known worldwide for their academic and research excellence.  He is also coediting the following two special issues of international journals: Rob Wilson, Chih-Ming Wang, and Roxann Prazniak, ed. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, “Arif Dirlik: The Radicalism of Possibility,”( London:  Taylor & Francis,2021); and Rob Wilson, Christopher Leigh Connery, and Isaac Blacksin, ed. boundary 2:  An International Journal of Literature and Culture, “Norman O. Brown:  Into the Future," (Durham, NC:  Duke UP, 2022).

Selected Publications

Pacific Beneath the Pavements:  Worlding Poesis, Ecopoetics, Becoming Oceanic (forthcoming Duke University Press, Spring 2025).

Selected Exhibitions

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674033436

Selected Recordings

https://www.academia.edu/video/lBJK0l

Selected Performances

https://www.academia.edu/video/lBJK0l