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 articles in Essays in Criticism, Modernist Cultures, and Textual Practice and reviews in the TLS and the Modern Language Review. She 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 2023.

Hannah is currently working on two major projects: a second monograph, Behind the Times: Lesbian Modernists and the Popular Press, and a book on lesbian writers’ domestic lives, At Home with the Lesbian Moderns, intended for a general readership.

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 and LGBT History Month.

Supervision

Hannah’s research interests include queer British and American literature and cultural history, lesbian writing, transatlantic modernism, narratives of expatriation, 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 convenes Modernism’s Queer Spaces (Year Three) and Out of Time: Sexuality, Textuality, and the Queer Temporal Turn (MA), and she co-convenes NOW Now: Intersectional Feminisms from the 1960s to the Present (Year One). 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. She is on research leave in the Autumn and Spring terms of 2021/22.