BIOGRAPHY Here’s the bio that I usually send out upon request, so please feel free to use this:
Robin James is a writer, editor, and former associate professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte. She has authored for books: The Future of Rock and Roll: 97X WOXY and the Fight for True Independence (UNC Press, 2023), The Sonic Episteme: acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, & biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), Resilience & Melancholy: pop music, feminism, and neoliberalism (Zero, 2015), and The Conjectural Body: gender, race and the philosophy of music (Lexington Books, 2010). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Jezebel, The Guardian, LARB, Real Life, BELT Magazine, The New Inquiry, SoundingOut!, Hypatia, differences, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and elsewhere across the internet. She’s an expert in feminism/gender/race and popular music, pop music and politics, sound studies, electronic dance music studies, and contemporary continental philosophy (especially critical theories of neoliberalism and biopolitics). She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Good Vibes Only:orientations, horizons, and the biopolitics of legitimation. This book is in many ways the follow-up to The Sonic Episteme. It argues that discourses of “vibez,” “mood,” “aesthetic,” and the like translate the calculative practices behind speculative (i.e., post-Gaussian) finance capitalism into the terms of popular culture.
Robin is Editor for Philosophy, Literary Theory, and Music & Sound Studies at Palgrave Macmillan. She acquires books in political philosophy, continental philosophy, American philosophy, African-American, Latinx, and Indigenous Philosophies, and other areas of philosophy including the philosophical side of Literary Theory, as well as in Musicology, Ethnomusicology, Music Theory, Popular Music Studies, and Sound Studies.
Send pitches and proposals to [email protected]
HERE is a link to the proposal form we use at Palgrave. The best way to submit a proposal is to attach a completed proposal form and any sample chapters (1-2 if a single-authored book, no samples beyond chapter abstracts for edited collections and Handbooks) to my Palgrave email.
Here are some things I’m especially interested in commissioning right now:
- Philosophy
- A Handbook (edited collection of 30-40 contributions, designed to define a field or subfield) on Critical Phenomenology
- A Handbook on Glissant
- A Handbook in the Philosophy of Sport
- A book series in Caribbean Philosophy
- A book series in the philosophy of the Americas
- Projects of all sorts (monographs, edited collections, Handbooks) that take an intertraditional approach, i.e., they draw on multiple philosophical traditions and scholarship outside philosophy in order to speak to concrete, real-world issues.
- Open access works
- Music, Sound, & Radio & Audio Media Studies
- A Handbook on feminist, anti-racist, decolonial approaches in music theory
- A Handbook on Podcasting
- A Handbook on Radio & the Internet
- A book series in Race, Gender, & Sound
- A book series on Music & Technology
- A book series of edited collections on individual musical works (albums, symphonies, etc.) or musicians.
- Open Access works
- Literary Theory
- Rhetoric
Outside of work, Robin loves dogs, gardening, running, and face-melting industrial techno. You can listen to recordings of some of her lectures here. She is also a digital sound artist and musician, and also works as a member of citation:obsolete. Here is the most current version of Robin’s CV, including links to most of her published writing.
All inquiries not related to Palgrave, including freelance inquiries, should be directed to [email protected].