Dr. Lewis Roberts

I am Lector and Director of Studies at Trinity College, and Research Fellow at the Pharos Foundation.

I read for a BA and MSt at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a PhD at St John's College, Cambridge. From 2023 to 2024, I was Jane Eliza Procter Fellow at Princeton University.

I am interested in how the most local and apparently trivial features of artworks are related to the largest and most demanding questions of value and belief. As a result, I often work at the intersection of poetics – that is, the study of the making of literature – and philosophy of mind and ethics. I am currently working toward my first book The Ends of a Line and the Passion of History, which studies the surprising and myriad ways in which the end of the poetic line has been seen to be valuable for thinking about ethics and about history.

My new project considers how the concepts of 'form' and 'Jewishness' influenced one another in British aesthetics.

At Part I, I teach the papers from 1660 to the present, and at Part II, I have taught 'Lyric', 'The Ethical Imagination', '1847-1872', and, 'The History and Theory of Literary Criticism'. I also particularly enjoy teaching 'Practical Criticism and Critical Practice', and regularly teach a course to finalists on contemporary literary-political theory. I supervise dissertations on topics within my research interests. 

I care deeply about access to education in the humanities. I work closely with schools in London and my native Yorkshire, and I am centrally involved with Trinity's outreach work. I lead the 'Literature' strand of Trinity's Humanities Residential, and I am a convenor of the Gould Essay Prize. I welcome enquiries from anyone interested in these areas. I occasionally make content for school students on English as a university subject: you can find an interview with me on why Milton's difficulty might be valuable to us on YouTube.