He lived in the Whittier/La Habra Heights, California area until he was 13; in the summer of 1968 his parents moved the family to the Pacific Northwest, where he attended Tahoma Senior High School in Maple Valley, Washington.
[4] In between, Robinson returned to the Pacific Northwest, earning his PhD from the University of Washington in 1983, with a dissertation entitled American Apocalypses directed by Leroy Searle.
In 1989 Robinson accepted a job as assistant professor of English at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, where he worked for the next 21 years, the last three as Director of First-Year Writing.
[15] In his more recent work he has begun to theorize "icosis" as the becoming-true or becoming-real of group opinion, through a mass persuasion/plausibilization process[16] channeled through the somatic exchange, and "ecosis" as the becoming-good of the community, or the becoming-communal of goodness.
Lin Zhu's book on his work, The Translator-Centered Multidisciplinary Construction,[22] was originally written as a doctoral dissertation at Nankai University, in Tianjin, PRC; and as Robinson himself notes in his foreword to that book,[23] Chinese responses to his work[24] almost always seem to display a complex appreciation of the middle ground he explores between thinking and feeling—whereas there is a tendency in the West to binarize the two, so that any talk of feeling gets read as implying a complete exclusion of both analytical thought and collective social regulation.