Born in Seattle, USA, Erik Sherman Roraback teaches critical theory, cultural studies, theoretical psychoanalysis, and USA literature at Charles University, as well as transnational cinema at F.A.M.U. (The Academy of Performing Arts, Film and TV School). Since 2014, he directs the program in USA Literature and Cultural Studies at Charles University. Erik S. Roraback also teaches Kafka, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, and central European cinema for the UPCES program at CERGE-EI. He was from 2015–19 a Visiting Scholar, and is now from 2019—present an Affiliate Associate Professor in the English Department, University of Washington-Seattle. In 2005, Erik Roraback was a Visiting Professor in the Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I), France; he was also a 10–time Visiting Researcher from 2004–14 in the Universität Konstanz, Germany, and from 2012 is a seven-time Visiting Erasmus+ Teacher-Scholar at the University of Winchester, UK, where he also holds a University Visiting Research Fellowship from 2014–present.

Erik Roraback has published three notable and strikingly original books: The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory (Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2007; xviii + 312 pp.), The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities (Brill, Leiden, 2017; xvi + 295 pp.), and The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life (Iff, Winchester, 2018; x + 384 pp.). As for new work, Erik Roraback is currently preparing for publication: I) a monograph on forms of cinematic circulation and capital and their nexus with forms of aesthetic and economic movement and thought in transnational twentieth-century cinema; II) a treatise on conflicts of authority, and of the sensible, which addresses new forms of life, the cultural unconscious and melancholic subjectivity, utopian rhetoric and modes of production in Shakespeare; III) a book manuscript on experience and commodity culture in transnational literature and in critical theory.

In addition, Erik Roraback has published/forthcoming 47 book chapters in monographs, or research articles in journals or volumes in Europe (Czechia, France, Germany, UK) and in the USA (Bloomsbury Academic, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Continuum Publishing Company, De Gruyter Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception—a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2020, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Theory and Criticism, Pynchon Notes, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class, Rowman & Littlefield, et cetera). He also made a chapter contribution on “Emancipating Forms Of Death With Polanyi And Leibniz” to Death And Anti-Death, Volume 14: Four Decades After Michael Polanyi, Three Centuries After G.W. Leibniz (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2016). Erik Roraback has supervised six doctoral theses to the successful completion of the degree, serves on the Doctoral Studies board for the study of English and American Literature in Czechia and also on the editorial board for the academic journal E-REA, Aix-en-Provence, France, and for the Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, Olomouc, Czechia.

Erik Roraback is also the author of some 78 conference papers, guest lectures, and plenary lectures in 16 countries in Europe (Aix-en-Provence, Bratislava, Brno, Budapest, Cardiff, Constance, Cork, Dublin, Freiburg, Helsinki, London, Nicosia, Olomouc, Oxford, Paris, Prague, Szeged, Tours, Trieste, Vienna, and Winchester), in the Middle East (Tel Aviv), in Russia (Moscow and St. Petersburg), and in the USA (UC-Boulder, Colorado, Evergreen State College-Olympia, Washington, K-State-Manhattan, Kansas, and Newport, Rhode Island). Erik Roraback holds a D.Phil. (examiners Terry Eagleton, Oxford and Maud Ellmann, Cambridge) from the University of Oxford, UK where he first taught tutorials for Magdalen College and for Mansfield College, Oxford. He earned a B.A. (cum laude) from Pomona College, Claremont, California, USA. In Autumn semester 1988 he participated in the Pomona/Oxford program directed by Charles Wenden, All Souls College, Oxford, where he studied under Robert Maslen (Christ Church College), Geoffrey Tyack (Stanford University Centre in Oxford), and the then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (Christ Church College), earning a perfect 4.0 grade point average. In 1993 he held a Rotary Foundation Graduate Ambassadorial Scholarship in the University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia. With a grant from the French government, he studied in Paris as a D.Phil. student on an Oxford/École Normale Supérieure exchange and attended the 1995 Seminar taught by Jacques Derrida at the E.H.E.S.S. on “Questions de responsabilité” / “Questions of Responsibility”.