Rob's Prose

Essays
  • "'The Past Has Been a Blank': The Diary of Thomas Cahill," Minnesota History (Summer 2025). Online and print.
  • "The Americanization of Bjorn Winger," Minnesota History (Summer 2024). Online and print.
  • "Bocland: World-Building in Nicola Griffith's Menewood and Sylvia Townsend Warner's The Corner That Held Them." The Critical Flame (May 2024). Online.
  • "An Attention to What Continues: Two Books on Herbaria." The Critical Flame 69 (December 2021). Online. 
  • "The Long Sunset: R.C. Sherriff and the Excavation of Angmering Roman Villa." Arion 26.2 (Fall 2018). Print. 
  • "An Open House," Critical Read. Online.
  • "The Seam," North Dakota Quarterly 84.3/4 (Summer/Fall 2017). Print.
  • "Metaphor Lesson," RiverTeeth ("Beautiful Things"). Online.
  • "Telephone," The Common. 7 June 2017. Online. 
  • "Love Behind Locked Doors: Phyllis Bottome in the Age of Trump," The Critical Flame (January/February 2017).
  • "‘We Live Close Together and We Live Far Apart:' A Look2 Essay on Susan Glaspell," Ploughshares. Winter 2017. Print & Online.
  • "‘Deceit Only Was Forbidden:' A Brief Literary Biography of Richard Henry Wilde," New England Review 37.2 (2016). Print. 
  • "Encounters in the Fairy Hill." The Bottle Imp 19 (Spring 2016). Online. 
  • "Bee Line: How the Honey Bee Defined the American Frontier," Readings. 17 March 2016. Online.
  • "Real and Not Real: Naomi Mitchison's Philosophy of the Historical Novel," Readings. 15 June 2015. Online. 
  • "Naomi Mitchison, Peaceable Transgressor," New England Review 36.1 (2015).  Print.
  • "The Previous Everyday: Nicola Griffith's Hild" (review essay), The Critical Flame (September/October 2014). Online.
  • "Out of Body: Reading Gender Through 'Women's Fiction," The Critical Flame (March/April 2014). Online. 
  • "Ancients and Moderns and the Public Use of Learning," Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 5.1 (Fall 2013). Online.
  • Cincinnatus, Cato, and Ancestry in Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington. mountvernon.org. 2012. Online. 
  • "James Bowdoin, Philosopher and Politician," New England Quarterly 84.4 (December 2011). Print. 
  • Contributions to Blog Divided (Dickinson College's Civil War blog) on classics and classicists in the antebellum and Civil War periods: "Joshua Chamberlain, College President," "An Antebellum Gladiator," "The Courtship of James Garfield," and "A Greek Professor in the Civil War" (about Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve). 2010. Online. 
  • "A Mirror of the Times: Catiline in Eighteenth-Century British and American Political Thought," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14.3/4 (2007). Print. 
  • “The Passion of Rose Elizabeth Cleveland,” New England Review 28.1 (2007).  Print. 
  • “Response from Rob Hardy,” Classical Journal 102.1 (2006). Print. 
  • “Girls Reading Vergil: Stories of Latin and Progressive Education,” New England Classical Journal 33.2 (May 2006).
  • “Theodore Roosevelt and the Masculine/Feminine Complex,” New England Review 26.4 (2005)
  • “Missing the Heart-Shaped Piece: How I Failed as a Middle School Latin Teacher,” Classical Journal 100.4 (April-May 2005). Included in "Notable Essays of 2005," selected by Robert Atwan, in The Best American Essays 2006, ed. Lauren Slater.
  • “Sinclair Lewis’s Work of Art,” New England Review 25.3 (2004).
  • “Yogurt Couvade,” Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers (Summer 2004).
  • “The Male Readers of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,” The Lion and the Unicorn 28.1 January 2004.
  • “Housekeeping Hereafter: The Preservation of Domesticity in a Technological Utopia,” Utopian Studies 13.2 (2003), 52-66.
  • “Sub Story,” North Dakota Quarterly 69.4 (Fall 2002). An essay about substitute teaching. 
  • “Wild About Baseball: A Naturalist Plays Catch with His Son,” New Letters 68.3/4 (2002).
  • “Gilbert White and the Natural History of Vergilian Echoes,” Classical World 95.2 (2002), 163-169.
  • “Susan Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Beecher and the Theology of Homemaking,” in Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, ed., Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
  • “Patience: Fossil Hunting with Professor Schmidt,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 8.1 (Winter 2001). 
  • “Twenty-Two Thousand Days,” Sonora Review 36 (Spring 1999). An essay about my great-aunt's line-a-day diaries. 
  • “Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish,” The Explicator 58.1 Fall 1999, 14-15.
  • “Oak Savanna Remembered,” The Prairie Reader (Fall 1998).
  • “Daddy’s Bread,” North Dakota Quarterly 65.1 (Winter 1998). An essay about being a stay-at-home father and baking bread with my son.
  • “Slowly,” Brevity Fall 1998
  • “Vergil’s Epitaph for Pastoral: Remembering and Forgetting in Eclogue 9,” Syllecta Classica 2 (1990), 29-38.
  • "A Study of Erasmus's Editions of the Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca." Electronic Thesis or Dissertation. Oberlin College, 1986. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. 23 Jul 2013.


Fiction
  • "Poem," Fictive Dream (August 1, 2025). Online. 
  • "The Biographer," History Through Fiction. Online (paywalled). 
  • "Blank Page," Emerald City. August 2023. 
  • “Kumquat,” Plum Ruby Review 2 (February 2004). Update: a kind review of "Kumquat."
  • “Orpheus Emerging from the Underworld,” River City (Winter 2004)
  • “Poetics,” Thema 15.2: Lost in Translation (Summer 2003).
  • “Eden,” in blink: sudden fiction by minnesota writers, ed. Margaret Miles and John Colburn. Minneapolis: Spout Press, 2001.
  • “Amphibian Heart,” Pleiades 20.1 Winter 2000.
  • “Closing Up,” Lake Superior Magazine September 1995.
  • “Stop,” an unpublished story, received an honorable mention in the 1995 Tamarack Awards, Minnesota Monthly

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