Robert Deam Tobin (1961 – 10 August 2022) was the Henry J Leir Chair in Literature, Language and Culture at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts from 2008 to 2022.
[5] An eternal optimist, he told graduates "Our dark strivings will at times be obscurely motivated and incomprehensible to our loved ones.
[7][8] Between 2008 and 2022, Tobin served as the Henry J. Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures at Clark University.
He published extensively on the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud, with his research on these canonical figures funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Times Literary Supplement deemed the book “brilliantly argued, beautifully written and highly erudite.”[12] In 2019, Tobin gave an invited lecture at Berlin’s Schwules Museum* (gay museum) on the theme of "Jews, Germans, and Same-Sex Desire" in the 19th century.
[13] He was the 2013 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Lecturer of Psychoanalysis, which is sponsored by the Sigmund Freud Foundation and the Austrian Fulbright Commission.
[14] Tobin’s research interest in cultural history and diversity led him to write about the Eurovision song contest as a place where Europeans negotiated the boundaries of tolerance.
[15] In addition to his scholarly work, Tobin was part of the curatorial team that put together the Worcester County LGBTQ+ History Project.