Robert Franklin Barsky is a professor and Chair of the French and Italian Department. He holds joint appointments with the English Department, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Programs in Jewish Studies European Studies, and American Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He is an expert on Noam Chomsky, literary theory, convention refugees, immigration and refugee law, borders, work through the Americas, and Montreal. His biography of Chomsky titled Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent was published in 1997 by MIT Press, followed in 2007 by The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, and then in 2011 by Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism, all published by MIT Press. He has another book forthcoming: Undocumented Immigrants in an Era of Arbitrary Law (Routledge Law, 2015)..