Hannah Roche

Profile

Biography

Hannah Roche joined the Department as Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in January 2018. Before arriving at York, Hannah taught at the University of Leeds, where she completed her AHRC-funded PhD in November 2016. In 2014, Hannah was awarded an AHRC International Placement Scheme Fellowship of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. 

Hannah’s research interests include queer literature and cultural history, early twentieth-century lesbian writing, transatlantic modernism, expatriate identity, and the politics of genre. Her work explores lesbian lives, writing, and writing lives; modernist engagements with Victorian fiction; and the influence of lesbian modernism on contemporary queer literature and culture. Hannah’s first book, The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Research

Overview

Hannah’s first monograph was published in the Gender and Culture Series at Columbia University Press in 2019. The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance explores the crucial yet overlooked role of literary and affective romance in the works of Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes. Drawing upon extensive archival research, The Outside Thing presents romance as a heterosexual space or plot upon which lesbian writers wilfully set up camp.  This book was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 and awarded an Honourable Mention in the University English Book Prize 2020.

Hannah’s recent publications include a chapter on ‘Writing Widows of Lesbian Modernism’ in Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres, ed. Elizabeth English, Jana Funke, and Sarah Parker (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and poems in Mslexia and Wasafiri. She has published articles in Essays in Criticism, Modernist Cultures, and Textual Practice and reviews in the TLS and the Modern Language Review. Hannah is co-editor, with Professor Jana Funke (University of Exeter), of the first Oxford World’s Classics edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, to be published in 2024.

Hannah is Principal Investigator on an AHRC Research Network, Coercive Control: From Literature into Law. With Professor Katherine Mullin (University of Leeds), Hannah is co-editing a volume of essays on Narratives of Coercive Control. She is also at work on a second monograph, Houseproud: A Literary History of Lesbian Homemaking.

Hannah’s research has been featured in the Guardian and on BBC Radio Four’s The World at One. She has presented her work at a range of events for International Women’s Day, LGBTQ+ History Month, and Pride Month.

Supervision

Hannah’s research interests include queer literature and cultural history, transatlantic modernism, life writing and domesticity, modern American poetry, and the Victorian novel (especially the Brontës and Thomas Hardy). She welcomes proposals for doctoral research in any of these areas. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

Hannah is convenor of the MA in Queer Studies. She also convenes Modernism’s Queer Spaces (Year Three) and Out of Time: Sexuality, Textuality, and the Queer Temporal Turn (MA). She teaches on undergraduate modules including The Age of Extremes: Twentieth-Century British and Irish Literature (Year Two) and American Literature: From the First World War to the End of Empire (Year Two). At postgraduate level, Hannah contributes to the team-taught core modules for the MA in Poetry and Poetics and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. 

Hannah holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and is a Fellow of Advance HE.