Robert Clines

Robert Clines is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Western Carolina University's College of Arts and Sciences. He maintains additional affiliations with the International Studies Program and the Global Black Studies Program. Currently on research leave for the 2024-2025 Academic Year, Dr. Clines divides his time between Asheville, NC, and Rome.

Dr. Clines earned his Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Syracuse University, M.A. from Miami University, and B.A. from John Carroll University.

As a literary historian specializing in the premodern Mediterranean, Dr. Clines examines Italian and Romance cultural traditions alongside their relationships with Arab and Muslim worlds. His research investigates how race thinking developed in Renaissance Italy through engagement with antiquity, exploring connections between religious identity, empire, and cross-cultural encounters. His work reveals how Mediterranean societies negotiated complex identities across religious boundaries while developing frameworks that would later influence racial categorization.

• US-Italy Fulbright Commission
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• University of Cambridge
• American Academy in Rome
• Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
• Bogliasco Foundation
• Folger Shakespeare Library

Dr. Clines' scholarship has received support from numerous prestigious institutions. His first book, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2019), analyzes the writings of Giovanni Battista Eliano (1530-1589), demonstrating how conversion from Judaism to Christianity was understood as an evolutionary process that maintained Jewish identity within Catholic frameworks. He is currently completing Ancient Others: Race, Empire, and the Invention of the Italian Renaissance, which reveals how Italians employed classical antiquity to reconcile republican ideals with imperial ambitions, ultimately contributing to early racial thinking that positioned non-Italians as inferior.