Profile | University of Exeter

Edit your profile

Rob Turner's research is focused on American literature, with a particular interest in experiments in the epic mode, ranging from Marguerite Young to Samuel R. Delany. His current projects include a book on sound and innovative poetics, and another on American literature and music. Recent publications include essays on Ezra Pound and Will Alexander, and a chapter exploring the politics of American metafiction. He is also a regular contributor to the Wire magazine.

Rob's first monograph is titled Counterfeit Culture: Truth and Authenticity in the American Prose Epic Since 1960. It was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019 as part of the Studies in American Literature and Culture series. This book examines the trope of "alternative facts" in American fiction, tracing the long history of inauthenticity as a conscious national mode. Authors discussed in detail include Thomas Pynchon, Andy Warhol, Vanessa Place, and William T. Vollmann.

His second book, Hip-Hop in American Literature and Culture, is an edited collection exploring five decades of recordings, paying attention to the challenges and possibilities of hearing rap as a poetic medium. The volume brings together a number of the field's leading critics, examining the relationship between the MC and other traditions (from griots and graffiti writers to graphic novelists and Nuyorican slam artists), while reading key methods and tropes in relation to American politics, and to new currents in oral and print poetry. The book will be published by Cambridge UP in March 2026. You can listen to its soundtrack here.

Rob has also contributed to a collaborative poem, Tales of Dionysus (University of Michigan Press, 2022). This book reimagines the work of Nonnus, the 5th-century Egyptian epicist, and involves major contemporary poets and translators including Stanley Lombardo, William Levitan, and Anne Carson.

Biography:

After working in the field of classical music, Rob completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2015, where he was supervised by Robert Macfarlane. Before joining the English Department at Exeter, Rob was appointed a Teaching Fellow in American Literature at UCL for two years.

View full profile

Dr Rob Turner