Rate My Professor C. Shef Rogers

Associate Professor C. Shef Rogers serves as Associate Professor of English in the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago, where he has been a faculty member for 32 years. He earned his BA from Emory University and MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. In 2023, Rogers was appointed the Donald Collie Chair in the English and Linguistics programme, an honor established to recognize significant commitments to scholarship, leadership, and teaching. As a bibliographer and book historian, he specializes in analytical bibliography, mentally dissecting books to reconstruct printing processes, including print order and imposition. His research interests encompass bibliography, eighteenth-century British literature, New Zealand print culture, travel writing, history of copyright, and publishing history in the UK and New Zealand. Current projects include a book on the early publications of Alexander Pope and a bibliography of English travel writing from 1700–1800, funded by a University of Otago Prestigious Writing Grant. He also engages with the University's de Beer collection of eighteenth-century poetry.

Rogers' key publications include 'Presenting "truth" in early eighteenth-century travel narratives: The case of Leendert Hasenbosh' (Eighteenth-Century Life, 2021); 'Imprints, imprimaturs, and copyright pages' in Book Parts (Oxford University Press, 2019); 'Copyright payments in eighteenth-century Britain, 1701–1800' (The Library, 2017); 'Monopoly power in the eighteenth-century British book trade' (European Review of Economic History, 2017); 'The instructive power of the fable in New Zealand’s Native School Reader (1886)' (History of Education Review, 2017); 'Enlarging the Prospects of Happiness: Travel Reading and Travel Writing' in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1695–1830 (2009); and 'The Use of Royal Licences for Printing in England, 1695-1760: A Bibliography' (The Library, 2000). He has held influential roles as Head of the Department of English and Linguistics, Co-Director of the University of Otago Centre for the Book, editor of Script & Print for 12 years, and two-term President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), where he organized a week-long online conference for 400 participants. In 2005, he established the Australia and New Zealand Rare Book Summer School, now part of the Centre for the Book, contributing to Dunedin's UNESCO City of Literature status. At the Otakou Press, he teaches letterpress printing to English majors and oversees eight editions of novels published before 1930 in New Zealand.