In September 2020, I joined Durham University (UK), where I’m Associate Professor of English Studies, 1660-1832. I previously held academic positions at Northwestern University (IL), Hamilton College (NY), and the University of Manchester (UK).

I teach and write about British and transatlantic Romanticism; poetry and poetics; aesthetics and politics; literature and historiography; and the materiality and literary imagination of the codex book. My work has been supported by research fellowships in Europe, the United States, and the UK (details below). While all of my research has a significant historical dimension, I’m especially attracted to projects that are conceptually and imaginatively rich and engaged with theoretical questions. “What is now proved was once, only imagin’d,” as William Blake put it.

Durham’s Palace Green Library hosted me on 25 September 2025 for a sold-out public talk 📚: John Keats Encounters the Shakespeare Folio. I’ll be giving that public talk twice more in 2026: at the Keats House, Hampstead (13 March) and at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, Italy (14 May).

In December 2015, my first monograph, Modernity’s Mist: British Romanticism and the Poetics of Anticipation, was published in the “Lit Z” series of Fordham University Press. An interdisciplinary study of historiography and literature, Modernity’s Mist explores how poetry and fiction of the Romantic period offer distinctive ways of imagining the present as the most recent historical age. That imagining becomes a particular challenge when the accelerating time of modernity meets the idea of an unprecedented and unforeseen future; it takes the shape in Romantic writing of a “future anterior” that opens up possibilities, exploring the space between the inevitable and the impossible.

My second monograph, Codex Poetics and the Politics of Romantic Reading (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), builds on questions about time and contingency that interested me in my first book, while engaging also with book history/theory and early Black Atlantic writers. With a double attention to poetics and material format, Codex Poetics argues that Romantic authors across literary genres envisioned the bound book as a technology of political possibility. This project was supported by a pilot grant at The John Rylands Research Institute (2019) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2022-23).

I have given Keynote Addresses at the British Association of Romantic Studies conference (2020) and the Keats Foundation conference (2019); these talks were entitled “Open Books” (BARS, 2020) and “Vanishing Books, Cockney Poetics” (Keats Foundation, 2019) and are part of my most recent, forthcoming book, Codex Poetics. In summer 2026, I’ll give a Keynote at the Wordsworth Summer Conference in beautiful Rydal.

I’ve served the wider field of Romantic Studies in numerous organising capacities. As principal organiser of the 2019 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism, I brought ICR to the UK for the first time. Then, from July 2020 to June 2021 (high-pandemic), I co-organised a transatlantic series of online events entitled “Romanticism in the Meantime”; you can find details about it here. Since 2023, I have been co-convening the North East Forum in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Studies (with colleagues at Northumbria University and Newcastle University). At MLA 2013, I curated the legendary Byron Night at Club Foot, Chicago.

Continuously since 2019, I have served on the editorial board of the Keats-Shelley Journal, based in the United States, and I was appointed as section editor (the Romantic Period) for the Literary Encyclopedia in January 2024.

In English Studies at Durham, I routinely teach on the following modules: L3: Literature of the Romantic Period; L3: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature; L2: American Poetry; L1: Introduction to the Novel; and L1: Introduction to Poetry. I have developed a new MA seminar for Durham’s Romantic and Victorian Pathway: “Adventures in Reading: Romantic Books and Political Possibilities,” as well as a final-year undergraduate module on “Romanticism and Repetition” and a single-term, second-year module, “Poetry by the Book.”

For English Studies at Durham, I have served as Chair of the Committee for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (2021-22) and, more recently (2023-24), as Deputy Director of Research (with a focus on research grants). Currently, I serve as Director of the MA Programme.

I welcome inquiries from prospective Phd students and postdoctoral scholars working in any area related to my research, within or beyond the Romantic period. (email: emily.rohrbach@durham.ac.uk)

I’m a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (FHEA certificate). In 2023, I completed the AdvanceHE Aurora Programme for Women in Leadership (certificate).

Grants and fellowships (selected)

2022: The Leverhulme Trust, UK (£43,856)

2019: John Rylands Research Institute, Manchester (£5,000)

2013: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Evanston ($42,000)

2006: Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna ($14,000)

*

_______

Durham Cathedral in the distance