Dr Merrilees Roberts, Faculty of English
mfr40@cam.ac.uk
Biographical Information
I studied for my BA at Murray Edwards College Cambridge, before moving to Queen Mary University of London for my MA in Writing and Society 1700-1820 and PhD on Shame and Reticence in the Poetry and Philosophy of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I taught Romanticism, Philosophy, Politics, and Art History at QMUL for a number of years before joining the Cambridge English Faculty in 2025 as a Teaching Associate in Literary Criticism & Theory.
Research Interests
My research focuses on Romantic poetry, though I have broad interests in literature and philosophy, literary theory, poetics, lyric, affect theory, philosophies of emotion, existentialism and medical humanities. My monograph, Shelley’s Poetics of Reticence, Shelley’s Shame (2020), explored the rhetorical phenomenological, moral, and existential links between shame and reticence, arguing that for Shelley, shame becomes the affective and stylistic marker of anxieties about aesthetic self-representation and the role of the poet in society.
My current work investigates how literature mediates the circulation of affect between body, mind, and environment: particularly in moments when this circulation falters, producing states of fatigue, depletion, or sensory excess. I am interested in the ‘erotic’ as an affect, and ‘fatigue’ as an affect’, and the historical, phenomenological and theoretical interchanges between these terms. I am also developing a medical humanities and intellectual history project on ‘inflammation’ and its relationship to theories of mind-body relations, to psychology, and to subjectivity. I am also interested in the moral philosophies of the emotions and their relationship to irony and satire.
I was an organiser of ‘The Shelley Conference, 2024: Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations’, Keats House Museum, June 2024 (MHRA funded). I am editing two publications following on from this event: A special edition of The Keats-Shelley Journal of America, ‘Percy Shelley’s Collaborations: The Affects of Friendship, Human and Non-human’, and a collection of essays, Collaboration, Intertextuality and Affect in the Shelley Circle.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming: ‘Shelleyan Psycho-geometry: Byron’s The Island and Affective Topology’, for special edition of The Keats-Shelley Journal, ‘Percy Shelley’s Collaborations: The Affects of Friendship, Human and Non-human’, edited by Merrilees Roberts.
‘Keats, Shelley, and the Eroticisation of “Object Anxiety”’, Essays in Romanticism, 32.2 (2025), 145–163.
‘P. B. Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude and the Poetics of Inflammatory Shock’, Litteraria Pragensia, 35.1 (2025), 21–38.
‘Shelley and Byron’, in Percy Shelley in Context, ed. by Ross Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
‘The Eroticisation of Sleep in the Poetry of John Keats’, English, 72 (2023), 40–54.
Review Essay: ‘Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited: Reflections on Entanglement and Alienation’, ed. by Richard C. Sha and Joel Faflak (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), Romantic Circles, https://romanticcircles.org/reviewsandresources/reviews/romanticism-and-consciousness-revisited.
‘Erotic Affect: The Sticky Bodies of Shelley’s Lyrics to Jane Williams’, Textual Practice, 36.11 (2022), 1–18.
Monograph: 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), 178–193.
‘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), pp. 105–120.
‘Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces’, Romanticism, 24.2 (2018), 158–168.
