Dr Lewis Roberts

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.

Teaching

At St Peter’s, I teach literature of the Victorian and modern periods, as well as papers in the theory and history of literary criticism. Elsewhere, I teach specialist papers in poetics, poetry, and the long histories of literary form and style. I care deeply about access to education in the humanities. I work closely with schools in London and my native Yorkshire, and I am regularly involved in outreach work.

Research Interests

Poetics; aesthetics; philosophy of mind; ethics and moral philosophy; theology; British Judaism; British early-modern literature; British Romantic literature; British Victorian literature; the influence of German idealism; classical prosody and the teaching of classics; translation

Publications

The Ends of a Line and the Passion of History (monograph in progress).

Of Influence, Special Issue of Textual Practice, 39:8, eds. Lewis Roberts, Jacob Ridley, Roddy Howland Jackson (September 2025).

Hopkins as Classicist, Special Issue of Hopkins Quarterly, eds. Anna Nickerson and Lewis Roberts, forthcoming 2026.

“Milton’s Difficult Example”, Victorian Poetry, Special Issue: ‘The Ends of Prosody’, ed. Meredith Martin, forthcoming September 2025.

“T.S. Eliot, St-John Perse, and the ‘Purity’ of Translation”, T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, forthcoming.

“Anxiety Again”, with Jacob Ridley and Roddy Howland Jackson, Textual Practice, 39:8 (September 2025), 1371-1381; here.

“Coleridge, Plotinus, and the Philosophy of Poetic Form”, Coleridge Bulletin, n.s., 65 (Summer 2025), 31-40.

“Augustine and Enjambment: A source for Hopkins’s term ‘rove over’”, Notes & Queries, 71:2 (June 2024), 246–251; available here.

“Simeon Solomon’s Contradictions”, Cambridge Quarterly, 52:3 (September 2023), pp. 290–308; available here.