The Hope- Robbins family began when Alice Eveline Hope married Rossell Casson Robbins in 1901 at Liverpool.  They had two children, Rossell Hope-Robbins, and Marjorie Hope-Robbins.  The children were given the family name of Hope as their middle names, and through their lives they used the hyphenated name.  Rossell Hope-Robbins emigrated to New York where he took a teaching post in medieval studies at the University of Rochester, New York.  The Rossell Hope-Robbins wing is named after him.

Rossell Hope Robbins 1912 - 1990

People who knew Rossell described him as a man of wit, collegiatlity, and scholarship ... "a short, rubicund, close-cropped, friendly presence, whose personality leaps out and captures you instnatly with its curious combination of humility and confidence."   He was born July 22, 1912 in Wallasey, Cheshire.  He began his education at Wallasey Gramar School, then proceeded to the University of Liverpool where, in 1933, he received his B.A. with first class honours in English Language and Literature.  In 1934 he received his diploma of education while, at the same time, also training in music and receiving his licentiate from the Guildhall School of Music, London.   His interest in music and verse remained a life-long interest.  His dissertation, and three of his earliest scholarly books dealt with the lyric in English, and in 1961 Colombia University Press published his Early English Christmas Carols, a gift edition with music, illustrations and an LP record. 

In 1937 he received a Ph.D. in literature and was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship by the Harkness Foundation, which brought him to America.  He was inducted into the US Army in 1943 where he served in the War Department Special Staff, Education and Information Division, at the Pentagon.  After the war he accepted a teaching position at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, now the New York Polytechnic Institute, where he taught until 1954.  In 1955 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and he retired from teaching to devote full time to his scholarship.  In 1958  he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

He returned to teaching full time in 1969 as an International Professor at the State University of New York at Albany.  He remained there until his retirement in 1982.  It was here he and his wife built the medieval research collection that, in 1987, became the Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester, New York.