Education

Ph.D., Yale University, 1985

M.Phil., Yale University, 1982

M.A., Yale University, 1980

B.A., Tel Aviv University, 1979

Research Interests

Dr. Griffin’s Scholars@TAMU Profile

• Theoretical and methodological problems in literary and cultural history
• Periodization
• History of authorship
• History and sociology of the book
• Epistemology of reading
• History of the literary field
• British culture, 1660-1832

Honors and Awards

• Folger Institute Seminar, Book Theory, Dir. Juliet Fleming, Nov. 8-9, 2019.
• Editorial Board, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 2017-2020
• PMLA Advisory Committee, 2016-2019
• Editorial Board, Poetics Today, 2016-
• Co-Director, Folger Institute Seminar, “Anonymity,” Fall 2008
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (12 months), 2007-2008
• Huntington Library Fellowship (3 months), 2004-05
• MLA Late Eighteenth Century English Literature Division Executive Committee, 2002-06
• NEH Research Fellowship for University Teachers (12 months), 2000-01
• William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Fellowship (3 months), 2000-01
• Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship (2 months), 2000-01
• Huntington Library, Mellon Research Fellowship (5 months), 1998-99
• Lewis Walpole Library Fellowship (1 month), 1998-99
• NEH Summer Seminar on the Enlightenment (Leo Damrosch), Harvard University, 1997
• Associate Editor, Poetics Today, 1996-2010

Publications

Ed., ELH Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson.  2005

This special issue of ELH, guest edited by Robert J. Griffin, is composed of ten essays written by Ronald Paulson’s dissertation students to honor their teacher and his contributions to eighteenth-century scholarship. Contributing authors include: Jill Campbell; Carole Fabricant; Maureen Harkin; Jonathan Brody Kramnick; Sandra MacPherson; W. J. T. Mitchell; Catherine Molineux; Joshua Scodel; and William B. Warner. In addition to the essays by Paulson’s students, the issue includes a personal tribute from J. Hillis Miller, long-time colleague to Paulson at both Hopkins and Yale University.

Ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymour and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century.  Palgrave, 2003

This pathbreaking collection of original essays surveys an important but neglected topic: anonymous publication in England from the Elizabethan age to the present. An impressive group of scholars analyzes a wide range of literary phenomena including: Shakespeare in 17th century commonplace books; the phrase ‘By a Lady’; the implied author of an eighteenth century queer fiction; Bentley and the battle of books; essays by Equiano (?); the novel, 1750 – 1830; and Frankenstein’s unnamed monster. Contributors: Vincent Carretta, Susan Eilenberg, Margaret Ezell, Kristine Haugen, Holly Laird, Susan Lanser, Brian McHale, Marcy North, Leah Price, and James Raven.

Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study in Literary Historiography.  Cambridge University Press, 1995

Recent studies of Romanticism have neglected to examine the ways in which Romanticism defined itself by reconfiguring its literary past. Robert J. Griffin identifies the genesis of a Romantic narrative of literary history in which Alexander Pope figured as an alien poet of reason and imitation, and traces the transmission of “romantic literary history” from the Wartons to M. H. Abrams. In so doing, he calls into question some of our most basic assumptions about the chronological and conceptual boundaries of Romanticism.

Other Publications

• “Anonymity and Pseudonymity,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Literary Authorship, eds. Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens, & Marysa DeMoor (2019), pp. 341-353.
• “The Profession of Authorship,” in Companion to The History of the Book, eds. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 2nd Ed.  (2019), pp. 773-785.
• “Anonymity,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, eds. John Frow et al. (forthcoming online & in print, 2020-2021)