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, digital culture and book history. 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 my specified 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; Brum literary culture; tech memoirs; boring writing; nonreading; mass writing; the art of editing; methods of World Literature; advice literature; big data approaches to literary culture; audio books; literary imprints; reader data; born digital literary archives; locative literature and 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 literary cultures, with a particular focus on the role of technologies in the ways we read, write, and communicate. This inevitably means I get excited about a wide variety of topics: digital cultures, book and media history (including reading communities), life writing, the institutionalisation of literary studies, interdisciplinary methodologies, cultural studies, transnational modernism and its legacies.

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 recent work has focused on the intersection between literature and computing since WW2 and is organised into two books. The first Programming Literature (Oxford UP, Oct 2025), traces the ways in which writers have used and thought with computing historically. The second  Talk Machines (Stanford UP, forthcoming) is an intellectual history of how conversation became a key model for understanding our interactions with computers (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 (keyforms.ac.uk).

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" uses mapping and visualisations to explores the (funding) mechanism of the fellowship as an organising form for literary culture over the last century.

At UoB I am an affiliate of the Institute for Data and AI, co-director of the Centre for Digital Cultures, 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.