Erik S. Roraback—born Seattle, Washington, USA—teaches critical and social theory, theoretical psychoanalysis, international cinema, cultural studies, and US literature at Charles University in Prague, as well as international cinema at F.A.M.U. (The Academy of Performing Arts, Film and TV School). Since 2014, he directs the program in American Literature and Cultural-Studies at Charles University. Erik Sherman Roraback also teaches for the UPCES program at CERGE-EI, and was from 2015–19 a Visiting Scholar, and now from 2019—present, an Affiliate Associate Professor at the English Department of the University of Washington in Seattle. In 2005 he was an Invited Professor in the Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I), Aix-en-Provence, France; he was also a 10–time Visiting Researcher from 2004–14 in the University of Constance in Germany, and from 2012 is a seven-time Visiting Erasmus+ Teacher-Scholar at the University of Winchester in the UK, where he also holds an eight-year University Visiting Research Fellowship from 2014–23. 

Erik Roraback has published three notable books: The Dialectics of Late Capital and Power: James, Balzac and Critical Theory (Cambridge Scholars, UK, 2007, xviii + 312 pp. 1 ill.), The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities (Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands; Boston, USA, xvi + 295 pp. 3 ill.), and The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life (IFF Books, Winchester, UK; Washington, USA, x + 384 pp. 3 ill.). Erik Roraback is currently preparing for publication three original book length monographs: I) 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 the divisions and contradictions embedded in self-identity, in the cultural unconscious, in Shakespeare, and in cultural modernity; III) a manuscript on experience and commodity culture in literature and in critical theory.

In addition, Erik Roraback has published (or forthcoming in print) 44 book chapters in scholarly monographs, or articles in scholarly 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, 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 also supervised five doctoral dissertations to the successful completion of the doctoral degree, serves on the Doctoral Studies board for the study of English and American Literature in the Czech Republic and on the editorial board for the academic journal E-REA in Aix-en-Provence, France and for the Moravian Journal of Literature and Film in Olomouc, Czech Republic.

Erik Roraback is also the author of 70 conference papers, guest lectures, and plenary lectures in 15 countries in Europe (Aix-en-Provence, 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. (thesis readers Terry Eagleton, Oxford and Maud Ellmann, Cambridge) from the University of Oxford, United Kingdom where he first taught 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 such scholars as 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). In 1993 he held a Rotary Foundation Graduate Ambassadorial Scholarship in the University of Western Australia in Perth, Australia. In 1995, with a grant from the French government, he studied in Paris as a DPhil student on an Oxford/E.N.S. exchange and attended the 1995 Seminar taught by the African-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida at the E.H.E.S.S.