Prof. Karlin is is one of the world’s foremost scholars of nineteenth-century poetry, specifically the work of Robert Browning, and a leading authority on Rudyard Kipling; and he has produced influential work on Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Bob Dylan.

He has been both an outstanding textual scholar, serving as co-editor of Robert Browning: Selected Poems (Longman Annotated English Poets) and editor of The Bostonians (The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James), and an influential and innovative literary critic with books such as The Courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, Proust’s English and The Figure of the Singer.

His most recent book, Street Songs, studies the appropriation by poets and novelists of urban songs and cries, from Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Florence, James Joyce’s Dublin and Proust’s Paris to Virginia Woolf’s London and Walt Whitman’s New York.

Prof. Karlin joined the University of Bristol in 2010, serving as Head of Subject for several years, and has contributed hugely to the life of the Department of English as a brilliant teacher and supportive colleague. Retiring from the Winterstoke Professorship on 31 July 2020, he has been appointed Professor Emeritus and will continue to have a close association with the University and the Department of English.