Robin M. Boylorn
Holle Endowed Chair of Communication Arts & Author
Dr. Robin M. Boylorn is the inaugural Holle Endowed Chair of Communication Arts and the founding director of the Holle Center for Communication Arts at the University of Alabama, where she is cultivating a space for storytelling and social justice in the South. She is also a Professor of Interpersonal and Intercultural Communication, editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and a member of the Crunk Feminist Collective.
An award-winning author, autoethnographer, teacher, scholar and commentator, she uses arts- based methodologies to understand and interrogate issues of identity, representation, mis/representation and culture focusing on the lived experience(s) of Black women in the U.S. American South. She blends critical and creative qualitative work with public intellectual commentary to make claims and arguments toward a more socially just and socially conscious society.
Her public writing and cultural commentary, including Crunk Culture, her digital commentary series for Alabama Public Radio, engage contemporary topics ranging from popular culture to politics, and from representation to reality television. Her work is available at Slate, Ebony, The Guardian, Salon, and the Crunk Feminist Collective Substack, The Remix.
A highly sought speaker about autoethnography and storytelling, she is the author of Sweetwater: Black Women and Narratives of Resilience, co-editor of Critical Autoethnography: Intersecting Cultural Identities in Everyday Life and co-editor and co-writer of The Crunk Feminist Collection.
TOPICS: Women & Girls of Color, Writing, Storytelling