Rate My Professor Cynthia Dobbs

Cynthia Dobbs serves as Associate Dean and Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Pacific's College of the Pacific in Stockton. She earned her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 and her BA in English from Pomona College in 1987. In her administrative role, she oversees programs such as the Self-Designed Program.

Dobbs pursues interdisciplinary research in American cultural studies, modernist studies, critical race theory, gender theory, and affect theory, centering on the interplay of aesthetics and trauma in modern and contemporary American literature. Her scholarship analyzes racial and sexual trauma, haunting, desire, migration, and cultural resistance in works by William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison. Key publications include "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revisited" (African American Review, 1998), "Diasporic Designs of House, Home, and Haven in Toni Morrison's Paradise" (MELUS, 2011), "Mapping Black Movement, Containing Black Laughter: Ralph Ellison's New York Essays" (American Quarterly, 2016), "Vernacular Kinship, the Creole City, and Faulkner's 'New Orleans'" (The Faulkner Journal, 2012), and co-edited introduction "Between Catastrophe and Carnival: Creolized Identities, Cityspace, and Life Narratives" (Biography, 2012). Recent work addresses Claudia Rankine's use of form to challenge social constructions of race and gender amid disease and diagnosis. She is developing a collection of narrative nonfiction and lyric essays exploring illness, the body, language, and identity. In teaching, Dobbs fosters student empowerment via conversation-based methods like draft comments, individual conferences, student-led lectures, collaborative jigsaw activities, and group performances. Her courses include Faulkner/Morrison, Blues, Jazz, and Literature; Black Women Writers; "Race," Gender, and Representation in Fiction and Film; Diagnosis; American literature surveys; Creative Writing: Fiction; Creative Writing: Nonfiction; Introduction to Gender Studies; and Pacific Seminars 2 and 3.