Robin Franklin is a third-year History PhD student at Princeton and an affiliate of the Gender and Sexuality Studies certificate programme. Specialising in the cultural and intellectual history of the United States since 1865, Robin explores how gendered, sexual, and racial power relations have moulded historical experiences of time, selfhood, and desire.

Robin’s previous research investigated Black, White, and Indigenous women’s relationships with clock time, analysing the material and visual culture of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century timekeeping and showing how an attentiveness to the gender and racial politics of temporality in everyday life can illuminate the cultural history of capitalism in America. In other work on the history of time, he has studied the temporal politics of soul cooking and Black nationalism (c.1960-1980) and examined how changing visions of the past, present, and future moulded notions of the self in early-twentieth-century self-help literature.

Queer history has become a major focus of Robin’s research since he arrived in Princeton in 2021. As a long-term project, he is currently writing a history of bisexual identity in the twentieth-century United States. Robin is excited to bring together evidence about bi identity from far-flung areas of the country; his research on bisexuality has so far taken him to archives from across the Midwest, the East Coast, and the West Coast. He is also in the process of revising a more experimental piece concerning the relationship of ethics to visions of erotic pluralism.

Most recently, Robin has begun a new project examining the relationship between Native Americans and the mind sciences in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Further interests of Robin’s include: the history of the emotions; consumer culture; the conceptual terrain of “religious” and “secular” thinking; violence and non-violence; histories of multiracial collaboration; film and popular music; political theory; and the history of political thought.

Prior to arriving in Princeton, Robin graduated in 2018 with a double-starred first in his History BA (Hons) at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. In 2019, he completed his American History MPhil with distinction on a Dunlevie King’s Hall Studentship at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His MPhil dissertation, ‘“Women’s Time” in the United States, c.1865-1941’, was awarded the Sara Norton MPhil Prize for the best Cambridge master’s essay concerning US political history. Robin then spent the academic year 2019-2020 on a graduate exchange studentship at the University of Chicago, a period in which he wrote on subjects ranging from the ontological politics of Afrofuturism in music to historical approaches to the study of “liberalism”.

In October 2024, Robin passed his Princeton generals exams with distinction in the fields of: U.S. History from Reconstruction to the Present; Women, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. History; and Intellectual History and Historical Thought. He has co-coordinated Princeton’s Modern America Workshop since 2023. Robin is happy to speak with prospective applicants about the History PhD programme at Princeton and is always keen to hear from anyone whose academic interests overlap with his own.

Robin’s enthusiasm for U.S. cultural history originally grew out of his earlier experiences as a musical theatre performer (a life to which he occasionally returns!). His theatre credits include: Malcolm, 13 (Apollo Theatre London, Original West End Cast); Oscar, Sweet Charity (Leicester Curve); Morrie, Brass (Winner of the UK Theatre Award for Best Musical Production, Leeds City Varieties Music Hall; also performed in revival productions at the Hackney Empire, London, and the Old Rep, Birmingham); ‘Fine I’ll Duet Myself’ (54 Below, New York); Bobby, Company (Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago); Governor Slaton, Parade (The Other Palace, London); and David Frost, Frost/Nixon (ADC Theatre, Cambridge).