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, transatlantic modernism, and literature and the law. Hannah has published widely on lesbian modernism, with recent work appearing in Modernism/modernity (2024) and Interrogating Lesbian Modernism: Histories, Forms, Genres (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). 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, which features chapters on Gertrude Stein, Radclyffe Hall, and Djuna Barnes, was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2019 and awarded an Honourable Mention in the University English Book Prize 2020.

Hannah is co-editor, with Jana Funke (University of Exeter), of the first scholarly edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (Oxford University Press, 2024). With Katherine Mullin (University of Leeds), she is editing a volume on Literary Narratives of Coercive Control, forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Hannah has published articles in world-leading journals including Modernism/modernity, Essays in Criticism, Modernist Cultures, and Textual Practice. She is currently at work on a book about queer domesticities and ‘companion reading’, which brings Hall into conversation with a range of critically neglected writers including Norah James and Naomi Jacob (and their pets).

Hannah also writes for general readerships, on subjects ranging from Wuthering Heights to women’s football, and has published poetry in magazines and journals including Mslexia and Wasafiri. She is committed to public engagement, presenting her research at events for Queer Britain, International Women’s Day, LGBTQ+ History Month, and Pride Month. Hannah has been interviewed for BBC radio, the Queer Lit podcast, the Guardian, and Metro, among others. 

Hannah was Principal Investigator on Coercive Control: From Literature into Law (funded by the AHRC Research Networking Scheme, 2022-24), and she is Project Co-Lead on 100 Years of The Well of Loneliness (funded by an AHRC Standard Research Grant, 2025-29). 

Supervision

Hannah’s research interests include queer literature and cultural history, transatlantic modernism, literature and the law, 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 Modernism’s Queer Spaces (Year Three). She also 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). 

Postgraduate

Hannah is convenor of the MA in Queer Studies and its core module, Queer Studies Across Disciplines. She also convenes Out of Time: Sexuality, Textuality, and the Queer Temporal Turn and contributes to the team-taught core module for the MA in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Culture. 

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