Biography

Robert M. West earned his B.A. with Honors in English from Wake Forest University before earning his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a visiting appointment at Wake Forest, he joined the Department of English at Mississippi State in 2002. From 2010 to 2011, he was interim director of the Shackouls Honors College. Since 2021, he has served as department head for the Department of Classical & Modern Languages and Literatures.

West led Mississippi State's application to shelter a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa from 2006 till its approval in 2018, and he served as the chapter's first president from 2019 to 2022.

He is associate editor of Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, a publication of MSU's College of Arts & Sciences.