Robert Winston
Professor of English and Director of First-Year Seminars

phone: 717.245.1363
fax: 717.245.1942
winston@dickinson.edu

I’ve taught at Dickinson since 1979. My training at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was in American Literature to 1914, though I also studied more recent American fiction as well. I’ve taught a wide variety of American literature courses at the College, including Early American Writing, the American Renaissance, the American Novel, the American Short Story, and seminars on major figures like Hawthorne and Melville. Recent courses I've developoed include: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Contemporary Scottish Fiction.

For the academic years 1998-2000 I directed the Dickinson Program in England at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. It was a great opportunity for my wife and I to return (we lived in Norwich from 1988-90 as well, when I was the program’s first director). This time we were accompanied by our two sons, the older of whom was born in Norwich in 1988.

My research has evolved over my career. I began by writing on early American fiction (Crevecoeur, Bird, Paulding). More recently I’ve been writing about detective fiction, including co-authoring a book on contemporary European police procedurals (The Public Eye: Ideology and the Police Procedural).

Please click here to connect to my curriculum vitae.

For information about my teaching, click on syllabi.

English 101: The American Novel

English 101: Fictions of America

English 212: Writing about the U.S.

English 358: Early American Literature

English 370:  The American Renaissance

English 404:  Senior Writing Workshop

• English 101: Continuities and Discontinuities in American Literature
• English 403: Moby-Dick and Its Contexts
• English 399: Edgar Allan Poe

• Freshman Seminar: Gumshoes and Gunslingers
• English 101: American Fiction
• English 358: Studies in Early American Literature
• Humanities 309
• Humanities 310