Kathleen Béres Rogers
Professor and Director of Medical Humanities

Office Hours: WF 1-2, T Th 12-2, online
Phone: 843.953.5925
E-mail: rogerskb@cofc.edu
Kathleen Béres Rogers joined the faculty in 2008. She teaches courses in late eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century British literature and culture, medical humanities, women's and gender studies, and disability studies. Her first monograph, Creating Romantic Obsession: Scorpions in the Mind (Palgrave, 2019), explores the Romantic-era pathologization of what we now call obsession through works of authors like Mary Shelley, John Keats, Charlotte Dacre, Edgar Allen Poe, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She has also published in venues like Literature and Medicine, Essays in Romanticism, Women's Writing, and Review of English Studies. She is currently working on a monograph examining how gender, race, and class worked to constitute Romantic "Idiocy."
She designed and currently directs the Program in Medical Humanities, and she also co-advises the Neurodiversity Initiative.
Education
Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
M.A., Boston College
Research Interests
- Replace Hungarian Romanticism with Disability Studies
Courses Taught
- English 110/FYE: Rescripting Disability
- English 202: British Literature since 1800
- English 509: New Romanticisms
- English 290: Narratives of Illness
Publications
Book:
“Scorpions in the Mind”: The Romantic Construction of Obsession. Palgrave, Literature Medicine, and Science Series: June 2019.
Articles:
“Form and Deformity in George Crabbe’s The Borough,”Review of English Studies. January 2022.
“Jane Cave,” solicited for Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers, ed. Ann Hawkins.
Book review, Hrileena Ghosh, John Keats’s Medical Notebook. Review of English Studies. February 2021.
"The Monstrous Idea in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,” Literature and Medicine, 36:2, December 2018.
"Embodied Sympathy and Divine Detachment in Crimean War Medical Poetry," War, Literature & the Arts 25 (2013). Online. http://wlajournal.com/25_1/.
“Public Intimacies: Frances Burney and Jane Cave Winscom’s Accounts of Illness,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RaVoN), 62 (April- October 2012). http://ravonjournal.org/ravon-62/
“The Boldness of Imagination: Illness Narratives Outside the Classroom,” Service Learning in Literary Studies, ed. Laurie Grobman and Roberta Rosenberg. NY: MLA, 2015.
“Breeding Scorpions in the Brain: Obsession in Keats’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil,” Essays in Romanticism 19
(2012): 33-48.
Review, John Keats and the Ideas of the Enlightenment, by Porscha Fermanis. Keats-Shelley Journal. 2012.
“Objects and Objectivity: Harriet Martineau as Nineteenth-Century Cyborg,” co-written with Abigail Mann. Prose Studies 33:3 (February 2012) 241-256.
Review, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease, by Clark Lawlor. ECCB (Eighteenth-Century Critical Bibliography)
“Permeability and Its Uses: Affect and Audience in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,” Women’s Writing 16:1 (May 2009) [special Charlotte Smith issue], 126-142.
“Maria Jane Jewsbury to Henry Jephson, M.D.: An Undiscovered Poetic Fragment,” Victorian Poetry 46:4 (Winter 2008), p. 511-515.
“‘A Kind of Necessary Inhumanity’: Cultivating Negative Capability through the Clinical Gaze,’” Studies in the Humanities 34.2 (December 1, 2007), 164-183.
In-Progress
Béres Rogers, Kathleen, first author. Allison Foley (Anthropology), Emory Stauber (Student), Haylee Rikard (Student), co-authors. “Super-Spreaders? Narratives of Young Adults during COVID-19.” Solicited in Hungarian Journal of English Studies and Crises of Care conference proceedings.