Dr Robert Blakeslee Gilpin
Postdoctoral Fellow
R. Blakeslee Gilpin received his PhD from Yale University in May, 2009 and spent the next year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. His first book, John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning With Violence, Equality, and Change, will be published by UNC Press in the winter of 2010.
The recipient of numerous fellowships, including a Beinecke Research Fellowship, a John Hope Franklin Grant, Houghton’s Library’s Joan Nordell Fellowship, a Gilder Lehrman Institute Fellowship, and the Huntington Library’s W.M. Keck Fellowship, Gilpin’s research interests and teaching focus on slavery and its legacies in history, literature, and art. Keenly interested in the rhetoric of equality and its intersections with race and violence in the culture and history of the United States, Gilpin’s work spans the slave rebellions of the eighteenth century to contemporary struggles with the echoes of American slavery.
Gilpin received a simultaneous BA/MA in history from Yale University before being made the 2001 Paul Mellon Fellow at Clare College at Cambridge University. While earning a MPhil in British history, Gilpin became the founding editor of the literary magazine Topic and used his experience jumping freight trains across the Western United States for an article in The American Scholar. His articles and review essays have also appeared in The New England Quarterly, Biography: an Interdisciplinary Quarterly, The Journal of American Studies and The Journal of Mississippi History.
Gilpin is currently gathering and editing The Collected Letters of William Styron with Styron’s widow Rose, due to be published by Random House in 2011. At the United States Studies Centre, Gilpin will be completing his book on Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion, focusing equally on Styron’s 1967 novel about the event, and documenting the longevity of slavery’s hold on America’s racial imagination.
