Biography
Robert worked in various jobs in a number of countries before putting himself through A-levels and then taking a First in Spanish at Durham when he was 27. He finished his DPhil at Oxford in 1980, and then taught at La Trobe University, Melbourne until 1997, with lengthy and frequent spells in Spain. In 1998 he was appointed to the Chair at Durham, and in 2005 to the Cervantes Chair at King´s. He was elected the first Fellow in Hispanic Studies of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 1994, and in 2000 corresponding member of the Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona and of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans. He retired in 2014 and lives in Valencia.
Research Interests
- Spanish literature fifteenth to seventeenth century
- Catalan literature
- Literature of misogyny and defence of women
- Theory of metaphor
- Editing medieval and early modern texts
- Translation
Robert has worked all his career across the two domains of Spanish and Catalan. A substantial part of his published work concerns the poetry of the great fifteenth-century Valencian Ausiàs March: he wrote his doctoral thesis on March in relation to theories of metaphor (published in 1985 as The Pervasive Image. The Role of Analogy in the Poetry of Ausiàs March, Amsterdam: John Benjamins) and brought out a critical edition in 1997, Ausiàs March. Obra completa (Barcelona, Barcanova), which he has revised for a forthcoming edition with Spanish translation for Ediciones Cátedra. His other work covers many aspects of peninsular Spanish literature.
For more details, please see his full research profile.