Staff profile

I am an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature. My current project, The Anaesthetics of Politics: Fascism, Form, and Aesthetic Experience, funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2024-2025), offers a major reappraisal of the relationship between fascism and aesthetics. Prevailing historical narratives contend that fascism exploited aesthetic experience, such as through mass spectacles and sporting events. Yet fascism also radically restricted how people could speak, act, behave, and feel, deadening their sensory worlds. Drawing on a comparative corpus of literature and art across Europe, I argue that fascism entailed anaesthesia. I develop the novel concept of "fascist anaesthesia" to account for the way fascism eroded sensory experience and to confront its alienating legacy today. 

Overall, my research is broadly concerned with two things: bodies and Jews. My first book project, Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature, engages with phenomenology and aesthetics to reinterpret modern European fiction and reinvigorate formalist methods with political relevance. In contrast to approaches that have interpreted this literature through postmodern skepticism towards language and representation, I rethink the theoretical insistence that the body fundamentally escapes representation by shifting towards a formalist understanding of embodied experience. The book demonstrates how embodiment is not what resists but what constitutes form. I put into dialogue theories of embodiment from phenomenology and cultural anthropology with the new formalist studies, in order to develop a radical new model of literary criticism, one that insists upon the political potential of what I term “embodied form.”

I also write and teach on literary and visual representations of the Holocaust and Jewish art and literature. I am interested in supervising PhD students working on comparative Jewish studies (literature and visual culture) and politcal approaches to aesthetics and form.

Authored book

• Roth, Z. (2022). Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature. Edinburgh University Press

Chapter in book

• Roth, Z. (2017). Frontière humaine: Race, Nation, and the Shape of Representation in Claude Cahun. In M. H. Gelber, & S. Sjöberg (Eds.), Jewish Aspects in the Avant-Garde: Between Rebellion and Revelation (119-140). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110454956-009
• Roth, Z. (2016). Real and Ideal Spaces: Writing, embodiment, and the beach in contemporary French literature. In S. Fuggle (Ed.), La Ligne d'écume: Towards a new topography of the French beach (177-192). Pavement Books
• Roth, Z. (2012). The Death of Desire: The erotic extreme in Michel Houellebecq's Platforme. In R. Williams, & A. Hemmens (Eds.), The Contemporary Extreme [Autour De L'extreme Litteraire] (112-123). Cambridge Scholars Press

Journal Article

• Roth, Z. (2023). How to Survive Totalitarianism. Lessons from Hannah Arendt. New Literary History, 54(2), 1059-1083
• Bishop, C., & Roth, Z. (2019). Introduction: Race and the Aesthetic in French and Francophone Cultures. Esprit Créateur, 59(2), https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2019.0012
• Roth, Z. (2019). “You can change your noses, but you can’t change your Moses”: Olfactory Aesthetics and the Jewish “Race”. Esprit Créateur, 59(2), 72-87. https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2019.0017
• Roth, Z. (2017). War of Images or Images of War? Visualizing History in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. Journal of modern literature, 41(1), 81-99. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.41.1.06
• Roth, Z. (2013). Vita brevis, ars longa: ekphrasis, the art object, and the consumption of the subject in Henry James and Michel Houellebecq. Word and Image, 29(2), 139-156. https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.774982
• Roth, Z. (2012). Against Representation: Death, Desire, and Art in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal. Philip Roth studies, 8(1), 95-100
• Roth, Z. (2011). Visions of Death and Desire: Exploring embodied ethics in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber