Hollis Robbins is dean of humanities at the University of Utah and a noted scholar of nineteenth-century American and African American literature, newspapers, film, and poetry. Her most recent book, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African American Sonnet Tradition, explores the interrelationship of influence, double consciousness, canon-formation, and poetic form. She is also the Co-Director/Managing Editor of the Black Periodical Literature Project at Harvard University.