Biography

Barsky’s multidisciplinary research combines social justice, human rights, border and refugee studies with literary and artistic insights into the plight of vulnerable migrants. He has published widely, and his books on undocumented migrants, refugees and the milieus of Noam Chomsky and Zellig Harris have been translated into 14 languages. He has also been actively involved in several national and international research projects, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the governments of Canada, Québec, Belgium, France, and the Dutch Royal Academy. In 2022 he became a Guggenheim Fellow.

Robert Barsky's new book 'Clamouring for Legal Protection' (Bloomsbury/Hart Law) delves into the canon of so-called Great Books, and discovers that many beloved characters therein encounter obstacles similar to those faced by contemporary refugees and undocumented persons. The struggles of Odysseus, Moses, Aeneas, Dante, Satan, Dracula and Alice in Wonderland, among many others, provide surprising insights into current discussions about those who have left untenable situations in their home countries in search of legal protection.

Recently, and with support from his Canada Research Chair on Law, Narrative and Border Crossing, Barsky built on the work has done for the past 15 years on a border-crossing journal called AmeriQuests: Narrative, Law and Society, which he started as the Canadian Bicentennial Visiting Professor at Yale. The new an open-access e-journal called Contours (https://contours.pubpub.org is hosted in collaboration with MIT’s Knowledge Futures Group, on MIT’s Media Lab platform. It focuses on artistic representations of border-crossing through a combined exhibition space and academic journal.

Overall, Barsky’s work employs humanistic insights to dispel false concordances that link terrorism, “anti-American” behavior and economic hardship with persons deemed “foreign”. Says Barsky: “Hardening rhetoric, militarizing borders and building walls is counter-productive to every sane domestic and international policy,” he says. “We need to combine judicial and policy work with cultural and humanistic efforts, so we can foster a deeper understanding of how central human movement is to a safe and peaceful world.”

Barsky is also committed to international education. For the past 15 years, he and his wife Marsha have combined their respective areas of research to create month-long “Maymester” courses in Switzerland, France and Italy. Their students learned about the art, literature and culture of the Alps, and meet with top officials from organizations including the International Red Cross, the World Health Organization, Doctors Without Borders, the World Food Program, and the International Organization for Migration.

https://robertbarsky.academia.edu/