Robert Barsky

Robert Franklin Barsky is a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Law School, at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an expert on Noam Chomsky, literary theory, convention refugees, immigration and refugee law, borders, work through the Americas, and Montreal. His biography of Chomsky titled Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent was published in 1997 by MIT Press, followed in 2007 by The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, and then in 2011 by Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism, all published by MIT Press. His most recent books are Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law (Routledge Law, 2016) and Hatched!, a novel (Sunbury Press, 2016).

Barsky was born and raised in Montreal. He attended Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and after graduating moved to Verbier, Switzerland with the intention of pursuing a career in skiing. In 1985, he returned to Canada to undertake 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 with Michel Meyer on rhetoric and argumentation at l'Université libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium.