Dr Merrilees Roberts

Profile

I studied for my undergraduate degree in English at Cambridge University,  after which I took the MA in Eighteenth Century and Romantic Literature at Queen Mary. I remained at Queen Mary for my doctoral study on Percy Shelley, which led to the publication of my monograph, Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence: Shelley’s Shame (2020). My current research is focused on theories and practices of eroticism in Romantic literature. 

My interests are interdisciplinary and I have taught broadly at Queen Mary, including modules on visual culture, continental philosophy and politics as well as literature. 

Research

Publications

'Erotic Affect: The Sticky Bodies of Shelley's Lyrics to Jane Williams, Textual Practice, 36.11 (2022)

Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence: Shelley’s Shame (New York; London: Routledge, 2020) 

‘Prometheus Unbound: Reconstitutive Poetics and the Promethean Poet’, The Keats-Shelley Review, 34.2 (2020). 

‘Shame and its Affects: The Form-Content Implosion of Percy Shelley’s The Cenci’, in Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 

‘Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces’, Romanticism, 24.2 (2018), 158-68.