Robert Harvey

Robert Harvey (born Robert James Harvey; 1951 in Oakland, California) is a literary scholar, philosopher, and academic. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He lectures in aesthetics, comparative literature, philosophy, and theory. His research and publications are primarily concerned with the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourses.

He has written on Samuel Beckett, Primo Levi, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Marcel Duchamp and Michel Deguy and has translated Lyotard, Deguy, Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricœur, and other French thinkers. His most recent books are Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010) and Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017). Harvey is one of several scholars who prepared the Pléiade edition of the complete works of Marguerite Duras.

Harvey served as chair of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook until 2017, when these disciplines were summarily eliminated by "strategic" (i.e. corporate) decision. Prior to that, he had chaired the Department of Cultural Analysis and Theory from 2002 until 2015, and was a Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris, from 2001 until 2007. From 2017 until his retirement from Stony Brook, his academic home was the Department of Philosophy.

Harvey completed his B.A in French Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972, and an M.A. at San Francisco State University in 1975. He returned to academia in 1980 and completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 on the ethical thought of Jean-Paul Sartre. During that period he also studied at the École Normale Supérieure and the Université de Paris VII (Jussieu). Harvey obtained an Habilitation à diriger des recherches (H.D.R.) degree in 2001 by defending a second thesis entitled "Les Styles de l'éthique".