Campus Directory

Pronouns he, him, his, his, himself

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Literature Department
Creative Writing Program

Title Distinguished Professor of Literature

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Feminist Studies Department
East Asian Studies
Digital Arts and New Media

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise Poetry
Asian Studies
Ocean Studies

Web Site

Primary Office Location Humanities Building 1
Humanities 631

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Spring 2024: 2-4 PM on Thursdays, or by arrangment.

Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services

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.  Email: rwilson@ucsc.edu.

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.

Selected Exhibitions

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

Selected Performances

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

Selected Publications

Oceanic Becoming:  The Pacific Beneath the Pavements (forthcoming Duke University Press).

Selected Recordings

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

Courses Creative Writing (poetry); Borderlands Writing; World Pacific: Indigeneity, Oceans, Ecopoetics; Poetics of the Sublime; Bob Dylan as Poet; Rural and Urban Dialectics in the World Pastoral, San Francisco as Global City; Beat Literature and the World