Roy Sellars
Roy Sellars (1983) is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter and English department administrator at the University of St. Gallen; he is also a guest researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.
After graduating with a First and staying on to complete a DPhil at the Hall on Milton, Freud, Harold Bloom and Jacques Derrida (supervised by John Carey and Ann Wordsworth), he worked at Marburg University, the University of Geneva, Cornell University (The Society for Humanities and the Department of Comparative Literature), and the National University of Singapore. For many years he was Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southern Denmark (Kolding and Odense).
His current research and teaching centres on poetry, philosophy and literature, philosophy and music, rhetoric, and critical education studies. An expert on the work of Bloom and Derrida, he co-edited, with Graham Allen, The Salt Companion to Harold Bloom (2007), is involved in an international reading group on Derrida, and for twenty-five years has been writing a book on Milton entitled Milton and the Material Remains of the Past (either he will finish it or it will finish him).
In recent years he has also become a translator and copy-editor.
He abandoned writing poetry a long time ago because, he says, “Wallace Stevens does it better.” He remains an intermittently active member of the Hall Writers’ Forum.
“George Orwell says that ‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’ I agree with the second sentence.”
