Zoe Roth

Zoe Roth is an Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Durham University's School of Modern Languages and Cultures, holding affiliations with the Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures and Centre for Jewish Studies. Her research examines fascism's sensory politics, Holocaust representation, and Jewish cultural production.

Roth's Leverhulme-funded project (2024-2025) proposes 'fascist anesthesia' as a framework for understanding how fascism deadened sensory experience. Key research areas include:

• Olfactory aesthetics and racialization
• Visual narratives of historical trauma
• Embodied form in modernist/contemporary literature
• Holocaust representation ethics

Her monograph 'Formal Matters' (2022) rethinks embodiment through formalist analysis of modernist literature. Articles consistently engage with how aesthetic forms mediate experiences of political violence and identity.

Roth currently supervises doctoral research on queer and non-standard bodies in French cabaret poetry. Her work has been published in New Literary History, Journal of Modern Literature, and Esprit Créateur.