About

Robert Clines is a writer, literary critic, and professor of history and international studies. He’s written for The Washington Post, The New Arab, and Al Jazeera, as well as numerous academic journals. He writes on race, religion, and cross-cultural encounters in the Mediterranean World. His work has been supported by the US-Italy Fulbright Commission, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Cambridge, the American Academy in Rome, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Syracuse University, M.A. from Miami University, and B.A. from John Carroll University.

His first book, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2019), explores the personal letters, official correspondence, and autobiography of Giovanni Battista Eliano (1530-1589), a Jewish-born Jesuit missionary to Eastern Christians in the Ottoman Empire. It argues that conversion from Judaism to Christianity was shaped by the belief that one’s Jewishness remained central to one’s Catholic identity, rendering conversion an evolutionary process that operated in the complex and fluid landscape of the Mediterranean.

He is currently completing Ancient Others: Race, Empire, and the Invention of the Italian Renaissance. This book explores dialogues, diaries, epic and lyric poems, histories, and letters to illustrate that race thinking was central to how Italians saw the textual and physical remains of antiquity. It argues that they employed antiquity in this manner to reconcile ideologies of liberty and virtue with visions of conquest and empire that resulted in the racialization of Africans, Asians, and transalpine Europeans as inferior to Italians.

He has begun work on another book, Race, Gender, and the Precarity of Empire in the Italian Epic, which explores the intersection of race, gender, and empire from Dante to Tasso. It argues that epicists emphasized racial and sexual purity as crucial elements in the teleology of imperial hegemony, versus race-mixing and sexual deviance as threats to the stability of empire.

He splits his time between Asheville, NC, and Rome.