Rebecca Roach was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on this project until 2018. She is now Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham and a Visiting Researcher on the Ego Media project. Her research draws on theories of life writing, the public sphere, linguistics, information theory and history of the book/material culture to explore communication and collaboration in digital literature. In 2018 she published her first book, ‘Literature and the rise of the interview’ with Oxford University Press, and her article ‘J.M. Coetzee and aesthetic automatism’ appeared in ‘Modern Fiction Studies’ in 2019. She also co-edited (with Annaleen Masschelein) a special issue of Biography in 2017.
A further project on online identity in patients with epilepsy also explores these issues around identity, representation and narrative within the growing field of e-health. Research associated with this project appeared under the title ‘Epilepsy, digital technology and the black boxed self’ in the journal New Media and Society in 2018. She is also creating an ethnographic archive of online self-presentation.
Prior to joining Kings and the University of Birmingham, Rebecca completed her doctorate at Oxford University in March 2014. Her thesis, entitled “Transatlantic Conversations: The Art of the Interview in Britain and America” assesses the role of the interview form within Anglophone literature from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The project argues that the interview has been a key site for negotiating conceptions of authorship since its inauguration. Rebecca has been the recipient of numerous fellowships in Britain and America and has a publication forthcoming with ‘Textual Practice’.
