Robert Cockburn

Robert Cockburn’s interests include Modern American fiction and poetry, the literature of war, and the literature of travel and of the outdoors. At an early period in his career, he wrote The Novels of Hugh MacLennan and published essays on Canadian writers. His poetry has been published in some twenty journals and six anthologies and featured on five CBC radio programmes. He edited Toward Magnetic North (2000), a photographic account of Ernest Oberholtzer’s epic canoe voyage of 1912.

Articles and essays by him on far northern travelers and explorers can be found in books, and in Appalachia, Arctic, The Beaver, and The Journal of Polar Studies. He has supervised twenty-one MAs and eight PhDs. He is general editor of McGahern Stewart Publishing, who have brought out his editions of P. G. Downes’ Sleeping Island (2011) and Distant Summers: P. G. Downes’ Journals of Travels in Northern Canada 1936-1947 (2012). He is also writing a history of the Lowland Scottish regiments of the British Army.