Research Areas

Self-writing (memoir, autofiction, autotheory, autoethnography); 20th- and 21st-century literature; sexual culture, literature, and philosophy; queer theory and aesthetics; affect and the body; experimental ethnography; technology studies and cyborg feminism; Sino-French contact and fiction; cosmopolitanism and urban studies (with Paris and Shanghai as case studies). 

Biography

Welcome! My name is Robbie (they/them) and I’m a first-year PhD student in Berkeley's French Department, interested in contemporary self-writing and autofiction. 

Before Berkeley, I earned my B.A. in anthropology and French and francophone studies from Haverford College in 2021. Submitting theses to both departments, I undertook a queer ethnography of astrology, tarot, and healing crystals among college students and a study of silence in French HIV+ self-writing (Jean-Luc Lagarce’s Juste la fin du monde and Guillaume Dustan’s Dans ma chambre). After Haverford, I spent the 2021-2022 year in mainland China as a Global Writing and Speaking Fellow at NYU Shanghai, where my colleagues and I held individual writing consultations with undergraduate students with a pedagogical focus on ESL composition in order to serve the campus’s nonnative English-speaking majority. In my capacity as Fellow, my research project constituted a (still-in-progress) compilation of creative autoethnographic essays on transnationalism and transgenderism, tentatively titled cyborg princess: notes on heritage, camp, and downloading gender. Most recently, I worked as a student affairs practitioner and accessibility liaison at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology’s Washington, DC campus before joining Berkeley’s French Department in the fall of 2023. 

I’m originally from Bel Air, MD; outside academia, I love choral music and musical theatre, all things drag, East Baltimorese accents, and taking public transit for fun; I'm a Cancer sun with a Scorpio moon and rising.

Selected Publications

Spratt, Robbie. “Intimacy as Transparency: Pleasure and Solidarity in Parisian AIDS Narratives.” Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, no. 18, 2021, pp. 38-43.