Judith Roof

William Shakespeare Professor of English

Office: Herring Hall 243
Phone: 713-348-2624
Email: roof@rice.edu

Judith Roof’s work is in 20th and 21st century literature, film, drama, criticism/theory, and culture generally, both US and UK as well as European loci of avant-gardisms. She has published books and essays on topics ranging from narrative theory, studies in sexuality, Hollywood cinema, DNA, the shift from analogue to digital, psychoanalysis, gender, film theory, hoaxes, The Big Lebowski, nerds, viagra, James Bond, feminist criticism, protozoa, systems theory, critical legal studies (she is an attorney), and the work of such authors as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Marguerite Duras, Virginia Woolf, Percival Everett, Richard Powers, Nicole Brossard, David Hare, Simon Gray, Tom Stoppard, and, well, Rabelais. She has also edited or co-edited collections of essays on dramatic criticism, the "oddball archive," feminist criticism, and psychoanalysis. She is currently co-editor (with Karen Jacobs) of Genders. She has just completed a monograph on comedy, and she is currently working on a project on presence, absence, mimo-technologies, and the hoax, informed by the work of Teresa Brennan, Siegfried Zielinski, and Wilèm Flusser as well as on a book on "retropresentism" which works through the logics grounding the reappearance of such figures as Ethel Merman, Rosa Lewis, and Cole Porter throughout the past 100 years.

Books include A Lure of Knowledge, Lesbian Sexuality and Theory, Come As You Are: Narrative and Sexuality, Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change, All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels, The Poetics of DNA, What Gender Is, What Gender Does, and The Comic Event. Edited (or co-edited) collections include Feminism and Psychoanalysis (with Richard Feldstein), Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity (with Robyn Wiegman), Staging the Rage: Misogyny in Modern Drama (with Katherine Burkman), Talking Drama, The Year's Work in the Oddball Archive (with Jonathan Eburne) and the forthcoming Lacan and Posthumanism (with Svitlana Matviyenko)