About
Robert Higney is an Associate Professor of English at the City College of New York and director of the department’s undergraduate Honors Program and Isaacs Scholarships. He teaches courses on twentieth-century and contemporary British and global Anglophone literature, modernism, and the history of the novel. His book Institutional Character: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Modernist Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2022) investigates ideas about literary character in authors ranging from Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith, and his writing has appeared in journals including Novel, Modernism/modernity, Contemporary Fiction, and ASAP/J. Education
PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2014
MA, Johns Hopkins University, 2008
BA, Boston College, 2004 Publications
Institutional Character: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Modernist Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022)
Review of British Literature and the Life of Institutions: Speculative States, by Benjamin Kohlmann,
Studies in the Novel 55.2 (2023): 242-244
Review of Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life, by Patricia Laurence,
American Book Review 43.3 (Fall 2022): 126-130
“Where the Network Ends,” in “The Character of Literary Criticism,” eds. Octavio González and Lisa Mendelman,
ASAP/J (September 2021)
“Institutional Picaresque,” in “Modernist Institutions,” eds. Meghan Faragher and Caroline Krzakowski,
Modernism/modernity Print+ 5.2 (November 2020)
“Scholarship, Inc.,” The AnaChronisT 19 (2019): 159-165
“Institutions, Genres, Readers,” Contemporary Literature 60.2 (Summer 2019): 289-299.
Review of Figures of Catastrophe: The Condition of Culture Novel, by Francis Mulhern,
Modernism/modernity 24.2 (April 2017): 412-414
“‘Law, Good Faith, Order, Security’: Joseph Conrad’s Institutions,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 48.1 (Spring 2015): 85-102
“Virginia Woolf’s The Years,” Yale Modernism Lab
“Virginia Woolf’s The Pargiters,” Yale Modernism Lab
