He is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

He has authored several books including The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, and The Beneficiary.

His recent work includes book projects on the history of literary representations of atrocity and the connections between criticism and politics.

A review by Keith Embley stated that "The Servant's Hand attempts to extract the political sub-text of its chosen literary material".

[5] Gerald C. Sorensen described the book as a "narrative that offers us a way of seeing", and that "in these margins of the nineteenth century realist novel something of importance is inscribed".

[4] Robbins' book, Upward Mobility and the Common Good brings the state into the subject of literature and class.

This work has resulted in a trilogy of books including Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence, and The Beneficiary.

[14] According to Christina Lupton, "in The Beneficiary, Bruce Robbins wants to make room for the note of guilt in our songs of gratitude.