Scholarship
Recent and Current Projects
Roche recently completed his twelth book, Theories of Ugliness: An Unseemgly Aesthetic History, which appeared in October 2025.
His book Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts appeared in late 2023.
His book Alfred Hitchcock: Filmmaker and Philosopher appeared as a paperback and an e-book in 2022.
His two other most recent books address issues of higher education. Realizing the Distinctive University appeared in February 2017, and in late 2014 Roche published with Meiner Verlag in Germany, Was die deutschen Universitäten von den amerikanischen lernen können und was sie vermeiden sollten.
His next two book projects have the tentative titles Proleptic Interpretation and Faith, Doubt, and Reason: The Mind’s Journey Away from God (and the Possibility of Return).
Additional projects include a study in the history of ideas, from Meister Eckhart to Hans Jonas, focusing on the idea of God’s dependence on humanity, and essays and lectures on various topics in German literature, higher education, film, and philosophy. An early version of an informal lecture entitled “What’s so Funny about a Joke?” is available here.
Books
Theories of Ugliness: An Unseemly Aesthetic History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2025
Beautiful Ugliness: Christianity, Modernity, and the Arts. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2023.
Alfred Hitchcok: Filmmaker and Phlosopher. New York: Bloomsbury, 2022
Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017.
Was die deutschen Universitäten von den amerikanischen lernen können und was sie vermeiden sollten. Hamburg: Meiner, 2014.
Why Choose the Liberal Arts?. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010.
Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
The Intellectual Appeal of Catholicism and the Idea of a Catholic University. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003.
Die Moral der Kunst. Über Ethik und Literatur [The Morality of Art: On Ethics and Literature.] Münich: Beck, 2002.
Tragedy and Comedy: A Systematic Study and a Critique of Hegel. SUNY Series in Hegelian Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Gottfried Benn’s Static Poetry: Aesthetic and Intellectual-Historical Interpretations. Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures 112. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Dynamic Stillness: Philosophical Conceptions of Ruhe in Schiller, Hölderlin, Büchner, and Heine. Studien zur deutschen Literatur 92. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987.
Articles
Roche has published articles on literature (Lessing, Hölderlin, Büchner, Wilde, Schnitzler, Heinrich Mann, Benn, Kafka, Broch, Thomas Mann, and Brecht); philosophy (Plato, Vico, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Karl-Otto Apel); film (Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Woody Allen, and Clint Eastwood); and education (literature pedagogy, chairing foreign language departments, preparing graduate students for the profession, the flourishing of departments, and German and American universities).
Fellowship and Grant Support
Roche’s research has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Max Kade Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission.
For a full listing of publications, see curriculum vitae.
Document for Realizing the Distinctive University.
I include here a document, entitled The Value and Impact of the College Experience: A Comparative Study, which is at the time of posting (July 2016) not otherwise available on the Web. I cite the study in my book Realizing the Distinctive University: Vision and Values, Strategy and Culture and wanted to provide public domain access to the document and offer readers an appropriate URL in my Works Cited section. Permission for the posting has been granted by The Annapolis Group.
