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Overview

Dr Zoe Roth

Associate Professor


Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures+44 (0) 191 33 43190

Biography

I am an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. My current project, The Anaesthetics of Politics: Fascism, Form, and Aesthetic Experience, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2024-2025), offers a major reappraisal of the relationship between fascism and aesthetics. Prevailing historical narratives contend that fascism exploited aesthetic experience, such as through mass spectacles and sporting events. Yet fascism also radically restricted how people could speak, act, behave, and feel, deadening their sensory worlds. Drawing on a comparative corpus of literature and art across Europe, I argue that fascism entailed anaesthesia. I develop the novel concept of "fascist anaesthesia" to account for the way fascism eroded sensory experience and to confront its alienating legacy today. 

Overall, my research is broadly concerned with two things: bodies and Jews. My first book project, Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature, engages with phenomenology and aesthetics to reinterpret modern European fiction and reinvigorate formalist methods with political relevance. In contrast to approaches that have interpreted this literature through postmodern skepticism towards language and representation, I rethink the theoretical insistence that the body fundamentally escapes representation by shifting towards a formalist understanding of embodied experience. The book demonstrates how embodiment is not what resists but what constitutes form. I put into dialogue theories of embodiment from phenomenology and cultural anthropology with the new formalist studies, in order to develop a radical new model of literary criticism, one that insists upon the political potential of what I term “embodied form.”

I also write and teach on literary and visual representations of the Holocaust and Jewish art and literature. I am interested in supervising PhD students working on comparative Jewish studies (literature and visual culture) and politcal approaches to aesthetics and form.

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Journal Article

Supervision students