Robert Hughes is a scholar of comparative literature, working at the intersection of contemporary continental philosophies of art and aesthetics and feminist and phenomenological theories of the body. His literary field is nineteenth-century literature, especially American literature, but also including European art, literature, and philosophy of the same period. He is also a translator of contemporary philosophy from French and German into English and a co-director of the International Philosophical Seminar in Italy.

Recent publications

Sloterdijk, Peter. The Continent Without Qualities: Bookmarks in the Book of Europe. Translated by Robert Hughes, Polity Press, 2026 (work in progress).

De Sutter, Laurent. Superweak: Thinking in the 21^st Century. Translated by Robert Hughes, Polity Press, Late Autumn 2025 (in production).

Sloterdijk, Peter. If You Have Never Thought Gray: A Theory of Color. Translated by Corey Dansereau and Robert Hughes, Polity Press, 2025.

Hughes, Robert. The Aesthetic Subject in Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Literature: Thinking the Body-Thought. Routledge, 2024.

Hughes, Robert. “Susceptibility and Cixous’s Self-Strange Subject.” Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure, special issue of Philosophies, vol. 9, no. 3, May 2024, doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9030065.

Hughes, Robert. “Serres’s Reading of Tartuffe: Hypocrisy and Comic Underdetermination.” Modern & Contemporary France, vol. 32, no. 2, 2024, pp. 201-215, doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2023.2262921.

Sloterdijk, Peter. Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry. Translated by Robert Hughes, Polity Press, 2023.

Curriculum Vitae