Robert Edward Spoo (born 1957) is a professor and scholar of law and of English, an academic of the law and literature movement, and a Guggenheim Fellowship awardee. From 1988 to 2023, he taught at the University of Tulsa; he joined Princeton University as an endowed professor in 2024.
Biography Born in 1957, Spoo was educated at Lawrence University, and received a BA degree in English in 1979. This was followed by MA (1984) and PhD (1986) degrees in English from Princeton University. Spoo worked as a lecturer at Princeton from 1984 until he joined the University of Tulsa in 1988. He received his JD from Yale Law School in 2000. He held positions as an attorney at various firms between 2000 and 2008, often simultaneously with his academic appointments. From 2001 to 2002, he was a law clerk of Sonia Sotomayor.
In 2012, Spoo was promoted to Chapman Distinguished Professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law. While at Tulsa, he also served as editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow. In 2020, the University of Tulsa named Spoo an "outstanding researcher." Effective on January 1, 2024, Spoo joined the faculty of Princeton University as the endowed Leonard L. Milberg '53 Professor in Irish Letters.
Spoo is editor of the Oxford University Press Law and Literature series and author of James Joyce and the Language of History (1994),Reviewed in: Clio, , , English Literature in Transition, , , European Legacy, , James Joyce Broadsheet, James Joyce Literary Supplement, , James Joyce Quarterly, , , Journal of English and Germanic Philology, , , , Journal of Modern Literature, , Modern Fiction Studies, , , , Modernism/Modernity, , , Philological Quarterly, , , Sewanee Review"", , , Studies in the Novel, , Without Copyrights (2013),Reviewed in: American Historical Review, , , Clio, , College & Research Libraries, , , Common Knowledge, , Critical Inquiry, Link, , , English Literature in Transition, , , Irish Literary Supplement, James Joyce Quarterly, , , , Journal of Modern Literature, , Journal of Scholarly Publishing, , , Law Library Journal, Library Journal, , Literature & History, , , Los Angeles Review of Books, Link Make It New, Link Nation, Link, New York Journal of Books, Link Publishers Weekly, Link, Reason, Times Literary Supplement, , Wilson Quarterly, , and Modernism and the Law (2018),Reviewed in: American Literature, , Choice, Common Knowledge, English Literature in Transition, , , James Joyce Literary Supplement, James Joyce Quarterly, , , Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies, Link Journal of Modern Literature, , , , Law & Literature, , ProtoView, Review of English Studies, , San Francisco Book Review, Link the latter written with support of his Guggenheim Fellowship. On top of his scholarship on James Joyce, he also published Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946, a 1999 book about Ezra Pound.
References