Staff profile

Emily Rohrbach teaches and writes about British and transatlantic Romanticisms, narrative theory, literature and historiography, aesthetics and politics, the poetics of time, and the materiality and literary imagination of the codex book. Her essays on these topics have appeared as journal articles in European Romantic Review; The Keats-Shelley Journal; Romanticism; SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900; Studies in Romanticism; and Textual Practice.

Her first book, Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation, was published in the Lit Z series of Fordham University Press in 2016 and was supported by research fellowships at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities in Evanston, IL. She is co-editor with Emily Sun (Barnard College) of Reading Keats, Thinking Politics, the 50^th anniversary issue of the journal Studies in Romanticism, for which she translated into English a bespoke essay by Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of the Spider’.

She has recently completed a new monograph, Codex Poetics: Romantic Books and the Politics of Reading, which explores ideas about the politics of 'the book' as they emerge in the interplay between Romantic poetics and their material formats. Through this double attention to poetics and format, the project revisits the Romantic period as a moment, marked by abolitionist movements and mass print, when the bound book was imagined as a technology of political possibility. Research for this project has been supported by a pilot grant from The John Rylands Research Institute, Manchester (2019) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2022-23).

On the occasion of the 200^th anniversary of Peterloo in summer 2019, Dr. Rohrbach organised the International Conference on Romanticism, which brought the annual ICR conference to the UK for the first time.

Dr. Rohrbach serves on the editorial board of The Keats-Shelley Journal and is section editor for The Literary Encyclopedia. She is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and completed the AdvanceHE Aurora Programme for Women in Leadership in 2023.

For English Studies at Durham, she has served as Coordinator for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion, and as Deputy Director of Research (focusing on grants).

While teaching on a wide range of undergraduate modules in English Studies, Dr. Rohrbach introduced a new MA module for the Romantic and Victorian pathway, 'Adventures in Reading: Romantic Books and Political Possibilities', which explores the interplay between poetics and format in the Romantic period. She also recently developed a single-term module for the Level 2 undergraduate curriculum entitled 'Poetry by the Book'.

Office: Elvet Riverside A72

 

• 2024: Writer-in-Residence and Kenan Distinguished Speaker, Flagler College, USA:
• 2023: Advance HE Aurora Program for Women in Leadership: Certificate of Achievement
• 2022: Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2022-2023:
• 2019: Principal Organiser: International Conference on Romanticism:
• 2019: John Rylands Research Institute Pilot Grant, 2019:
• 2012: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 2012-2013:
• 2005: Junior Visiting Research Fellowship, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna:

Authored book

• Rohrbach, E. (2016). Modernity's Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation. Fordham University Press, Lit Z

Book review

• Rohrbach, E. (online). Review of Arden Hegele's Romantic Autopsy: Literary Form and Medical Reading. Romanticism,
• Rohrbach, E. (2016). Review of Susan Wolfson's Reading John Keats. The BARS Review,
• Rohrbach, E. (2010). Review of Jacques Khalip's Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession. Studies in Romanticism, 49(2), 340-345
• Rohrbach, E. (2009). Review of Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton's Repossessing the Romantic Past. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 31(4), 399-402
• Rohrbach, E. (2006). Review of Peter Fritzsche's Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History. Studies in Romanticism, 45(3), 486-490
• Rohrbach, E. (2005). Review of Kevis Goodman's Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History

Chapter in book

• Rohrbach, E. (2021). "The Novelty of Mansfield Park". In M. Frawley, & C. Wilson (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Jane Austen. Routledge
• Rohrbach, E. (2019). 'Without you, I am nothing': On the Counterfactual Imagination in Emma (reprint from 2018 journal article). In E. C. Lupton (Ed.), Literature and Contingency. Routledge
• Rohrbach, E. (2019). "'uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts': Pluralities and the Historical Present in Keats and Hazlitt". In E. B. Rejack, & M. Theune (Eds.), Keats's Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives. Liverpool University Press
• Rohrbach, E. (2012). "Negative Capability". In E. R. Greene (Ed.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. (4th). Princeton University Press
• Rohrbach, E. (2012). "The Lake Poets". In E. R. Greene (Ed.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. (4th). Princeton University Press
• Rancière, J. (., Rohrbach, E. (., & Sun, E. (. (2011). "The Politics of the Spider". In Studies in Romanticism (journal)

Journal Article

• Rohrbach, E. (online). "In London and Louvain: Bookish Materiality and Social Equality"
• Rohrbach, E. (2022). Keats's Vanishing Books. Romanticism, 28(2), 165-174. https://doi.org/10.3366/rom.2022.0552
• Rohrbach, E. (2021). Afterword. Romantic Futurities: Onwards!. Romanticism on the Net,
• Rohrbach, E. (2018). "‘Without you, I am nothing’: On the Counterfactual Imagination in Emma". Textual Practice, 32(3), 471-488. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236x.2018.1442396
• Rohrbach, E. (2018). "To Lean upon a Closed Book: Keats’s Sonnets, Formal Closure, and the Codex". European Romantic Review, 29(2), 229-245. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2018.1439388
• Rohrbach, E. (2014). "Reading the Heart, Reading the World: Keats's Historiographical Aesthetic". European Romantic Review, 25(3), 275-288. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2014.899765
• Rohrbach, E. (2012). "'Must the event decide?': Byron and Austen in Search of the Present"
• Rohrbach, E., & Sun, E. (2011). "Reading Keats, Thinking Politics: An Introduction". Studies in Romanticism, 50(2),
• Rohrbach, E. (2006). "Anna Barbauld’s History of the Future". European Romantic Review, 17(2), 179-188. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509580600687822
• Rohrbach, E. (2004). "Austen's Later Subjects". SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 44(4), 737-752
• Rohrbach, E. (2004). "Representing Time and Gender: Keats’s Prose, Keats’s Poetics". E-REA, https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.442

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Rohrbach, E., & Mulrooney, J. (2021). Video Interview with the Keats-Shelley Association of America on the topic of 'Romanticism in the Meantime'--the 20-event series I co-curated online July 2020-June 2021