Biography

Robert Soroka, B.Comm, MBA, Juris Doctor

Business professor Robert Soroka is known to be a dynamic, charismatic professional with significant industry experience. Born in Montreal, Soroka earned his first two degrees locally: a Bachelor of Commerce from McGill and an MBA from Concordia, and discovered a passion for teaching in the years following.

Professor Soroka has a varied background as a criminal lawyer, professor, union executive and grievance officer, marketing analyst, TV and radio personality, conference speaker, consultant, and, as a pastime, actor and playwright. He began his career in industry, working for several years as a marketing and financial analyst for large chain-store retailers and for companies competing in industrial markets. Later, he earned his Juris Doctor degree from the State University of New York, and worked in the area of criminal law in the state of New York.

In addition to teaching at Concordia University, Professor Soroka is currently or has been listed as faculty at McGill University, University of Ottawa, and Universite de Montreal (HEC), and has taught at many CEGEPs. He has taught at various levels: MBA, undergraduate, Continuing Education, and college. At Dawson College, he served as Department Chair and Program Coordinator for 10 years; he is also the founder and past coordinator of the annual Dawson Quebec Case Competition.

His teaching is recognized: he is the 2019 recipient of the President's Excellence in Teaching Award. He was also honoured with Concordia University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997 and the McGill University Management Undergraduate Students’ Teaching Award in 2009. 

Currently, Professor Soroka has an active consulting practice; he serves as a private consultant for both public and private organizations, primarily in the areas of retail, health care, marketing/promotion, entrepreneurship, and education.

Professor Soroka wears several hats at Concordia: most notably, he is the President of the Concordia University Part Time Faculty Association (CUPFA), a 1000 member union. He is a faculty member in the Marketing and Management departments at JMSB; he was the most senior faculty member at Continuing Education; he was an active member of JMSB’s Strategic Planning committee; he has sat on several hiring committees (Marketing Department, School of Extended Learning, Marketing Chair, Dean); he was on the Program Appraisal Committee. He sits on the Board of Governors, the Board's Finance Committee, and Senate at Concordia.

Professor Soroka has made more than 1500 national and local television and radio guest appearances, and was the Consumer Cop on Montreal Today (CTV) and the Consumer Correspondent on This Morning Live (Global Television) for 5 years. Professor Soroka appeared many times as a commentator on Canada AM (which was the country’s highest rated television morning show until 2016), CTV Newsnet, Global TV News, Fox News (New York) and CBC News. He previously hosted a local week-in-review radio show for several years.  One of Professor Soroka’s passions is theatre; he has authored several plays, all of which have been produced. 

Books

Selected essays

Recent and forthcoming publications

The Novel Stage: Narrative Form from the restoration to Jane Austen (Bucknell UP, 2020)

This Distracted Globe: World-Making in Early Modern Literature, co-edited with Karen Newman and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 

“Jonathan Goldberg.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. Ed. Eugene O'Brien. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://www-oxfordbibliographies-com.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0090.xml

“Cooper’s Queer Objects,” Angelaki 23:1 (2018) 131-143. Reprinted in Queer Objects eds. Guy Davidson and Monique Rooney, London: Routledge, 2019.

“Wilful Walpole” in Walpole at 300 eds. Jill Campbell, Jonathan Kramnick, and Cynthia Roman, under contract at Yale UP

 

“Tragedy, Comedy, Tragicomedy and the Incubation of New Genres” in Emergent Nation: Early Modern Literature in Transition V. 2 of 3 vols ed. Elizabeth Sauer, Early Modern British Literature in Transition gen. ed. Stephen Dobranski (London:  Cambridge University Press, 2019), 66-79.

 

Other activities

Research related web links

courses 2020/21 and 2021/22

2020/21
Intro to Drama, ENGL 240/2
ENGL 470/4 The Honours Seminar, "Towards a Genealogy of Autofiction"
ENGL 640/4 "Towards a Genealogy of Autofiction"


2021/22

Fall: On sabbatical

Winter: ENGL 322/4 Restoration and 18th century Drama
A graduate course "Islands: setting, experience, environment"

Islands, in early modern and 18^th-century texts such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, William Shakespeare’s Tempest, Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, William Davenant and John Dryden’s Enchanted Island, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and countless later texts in the genre of the robinsonade, serve as laboratories for probing and/or reproducing the limits of the social world and maps for the relations it fosters and that which can be known about it. Some latter-day instances retain the association of islands with enchantment, though some explore disenchantment by establishing the proximity of islands to prisons. This course aims to survey both possibilities. After examining early examples of island literature, we will turn to selected latter-day texts, both literary and theoretical, some drawn from the reception of the Tempest in the Caribbean (Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Michelle Cliff) and some rewritings of Defoe (Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” J.M. Coeztee’s Foe and Michel Tournier’s Friday or the Bones of the Pacific) in order to explore the concepts needed to theorize islands, including chronotope, ecology, and adaptation.