Robin LeBlanc Professor of Politics

Holekamp 107
540-458-8612
leblancr@wlu.edu
Curriculum Vitae
On-leave winter 2023

Professor LeBlanc came to Washington and Lee in 1998. She has spent her career studying the political life of ordinary people through participant observation in fields as diverse as sake shops, conservative electoral campaigns, grocery cooperatives, and anarchist squatter communities. She has written two books on Japanese politics, The Political World of the Japanese Housewife (A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 1999), and The Art of the Gut: Manhood, Power, and Ethics in Japanese Politics (Shortlisted for the 2010 International Convention of Asia Scholars Book Prize). Currently, Professor LeBlanc is working on a project in Bologna, Italy titled “Opposing the Desert: Reconstructing the Spaces of Democracy in a Postgrowth City.”

LeBlanc teaches classes on global politics, gender and politics, political philosophy, urban community, and protest. She has served on three different occasions as the head of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and was the founding chair of Washington and Lee’s biannual campus-wide conference for student work, Science, Society, and the Arts.

Among other honors, LeBlanc has won three Fulbright research fellowships: two for Japan, one for graduate work in 1991 and another in 2002, as well as one for Italy in 2013. LeBlanc served as a visiting research fellow at Rikkyo University in Tokyo in 2010 and as an International Christian University Foundation invited visiting professor in the ICU Gender Studies Program, in 2007, also in Tokyo. LeBlanc was Assistant Professor of Politics at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1994-1998. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science in 1994 from the University of Oklahoma. Her dissertation on Japanese women and politics won both the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics and the American Political Science Association Award for the Best Dissertation on Women and Politics Written in 1994.

Education

Ph.D., University of Oklahoma (1994)

B.A., Berry College (1988)

Teaching

Politics