Eva Rothenberg, who graduated from Emory College in 2021 with Highest Honors and degrees in linguistics and English, was awarded the 2024 Marshall Scholarship. She completed an MA in Applied Linguistics with Distinction at the University of Birmingham, where her dissertation examined the communicative and ethical effects of silence in American Gothic fiction. She is now pursuing an MPhil in English Studies at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on nineteenth century British literature.
As an undergraduate at Emory’s Oxford campus, Rothenberg pursued a rich range of projects, including a computational analysis of British poetry that she later presented at the 2019 International Corpus Linguistics conference. She stayed active on campus as a tutor at the Oxford and Emory writing centers, as a co-host on WMRE radio, and a writer for the Emory Spoke satire magazine. Her interest in sociolinguistic inquiry and critical analysis led her to undertake a rigorous and pertinent senior thesis that examined the discourse of university reopening announcements at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rothenberg continued her impressive track record after graduation, spending two years as a fact checker in CNN's editorial research department where she ensured journalistic integrity of sensitive breaking news, investigative reporting, documentaries, and television packages across all areas of the network. At the same time, she contributed as a freelance writer to CNN’s arts section before being hired as a business reporter in the New York bureau in 2023.
Since receiving the Marshall Scholarship in 2024, Rothenberg has written a book chapter about agricultural displacement and Dust Bowl literature for an edited collection on the “Georgic Gothic” (Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2026). Over the past year, she has presented her literary and linguistics research at several conferences across the UK. In the beginning of the fall semester, Rothenberg also had the opportunity to give a guest lecture at the new Oxford Launch program in London, where she taught a class about conceptual metaphor theory and its applications in literary and affect studies. In her research, she is interested in gender and materiality, particularly in the ways writers deploy the body and silence to interrogate the boundaries of selfhood, knowledge, and social authority.