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 Romanticism; poetry and poetics; aesthetics and politics; literature and historiography; and, more recently, 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).

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.

I am currently completing a new monograph entitled Codex Poetics: Romantic Books and the Politics of Reading. (See ‘current research’ page.) 📣📣 For 2022-23, I’ve been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in support of this project. Leverhulme grant listings 2022

Another new project entitled “Books and Freedom in the Transatlantic Nineteenth Century” brings me into collaboration with Ivy Wilson (Northwestern University); one outcome of this collaboration will be an edited essay collection.

I have given keynote addresses at the British Association of Romantic Studies conference (2020) and the Keats Foundation conference (2019); these keynote talks were entitled “Open Books” (BARS, 2020) and “Vanishing Books, Cockney Poetics” (Keats Foundation, 2019) and are part of my new book project, Codex Poetics.

As principal organiser of the 2019 meeting of the International Conference on Romanticism, I brought ICR to the UK for the first time. And 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.

In English Studies at Durham, I routinely teach on the following modules: L3: Literature of the Romantic Period (convener); L3: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature; L2: American Poetry; L1: Introduction to the Novel; and L1: Introduction to Poetry. I developed a new MA seminar for Durham’s Romantic and Victorian Pathway: ‘Adventures in Reading: Romantic Books and Political Possibilities’.

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 serve on the editorial board of the Keats-Shelley Journal, based in the United States; I’m the Committee Chair for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Durham English; and I’m a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (FHEA 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)

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Durham at night