Emily Rohrbach
Assistant Professor of Literature
University Hall Room 407
Telephone: (847) 491-5157
Fax: (847) 467-1545
E-mail: e-rohrbach@northwestern.edu
Emily Rohrbach (Ph.D. Boston University) teaches and writes about British Romanticism, especially second-generation writers, as well as psychoanalytic theory, historicisms, and aesthetics. A former junior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, she is completing a book-length project, Dark Passages of Time: Romantic Historiography and the Literary Subject, which shows how the sense of anticipation in Romantic literature evokes the unknowability of the subject poised on the horizon of a dark futurity. This discovery implies, moreover, that in their aesthetics of anticipation Romantic writers reshape the relation between literature and history to convey the difficulty of understanding the present as history when the moment is framed by an unknown future. A new project, Romantic Encounters, will examine spatial metaphors of mental exploration and interruption in Romantic poetry in relation to Romantic-period narratives of travel and exploration. She has published articles on Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, and John Keats in Studies in English Literature, European Romantic Review, and Revue d’Etudes Anglophones, and has book reviews forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Studies in Romanticism. She is also co-editing a special issue of Studies in Romanticism on Keats, aesthetics, and politics to appear in summer 2011.
