Dr Merrilees Roberts

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 briefly undertaking a role in the Cambridge English Faculty as a Teaching Associate in Literary Criticism & Theory. I joined the OU as a Lecturer in English in 2026.

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 erotic affect and unrequited love in Romantic poetry, with attention to the interchanges between philosophical and physiological theorising in the period. I am also interested in the history and theory of the emotions and their relationship to irony.

I was an organiser of ‘The Shelley Conference, 2024: Posthumous Poems, Posthumous Collaborations’, Keats House Museum, June 2024 (MHRA funded). I am editing a collection of essays arising from this event, Collaboration, Intertextuality and Affect in the Shelley Circle.

I am happy to hear from PhD students interested in any aspect of Romantic literature, but especially topics on poetry, philosophy, medical humanities and the history of the emotions.

Publications

‘Introduction’ to essay cluster ‘Percy Shelley’s Collaborations: The Affects of Friendship, Human and Non-human’, Keats Shelley Journal 73 (2024), 53-6. Online publication 2024, print forthcoming.

‘Shelleyan Psycho-Geometry: Byron’s The Island and Affective Topology’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 73 (2024), 123–145. Online publication 2024, print forthcoming.

‘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.

 Roundtable presentation on P. B. Shelley’s ‘Jane Poems’, January 2022 

Roundtable, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s “object lessons”’, for interactive scholarly workshop linked to AHRC funded project ‘The Romantic Ridiculous’ at Edge Hill University, with Early Career bursary, June 2021