He is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

[1] In his first year at Swarthmore College, Rothberg discovered Literary Theory through reading Jonathan Culler's book Saussure.

The book, published by Stanford University Press, discussed how the memory of the Holocaust was reiterated in the articulation of other histories of victimization in the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the United States.

[11] Two years later, in 2011, Rothberg, Yasemin Yildiz, and Andrés Nader earned a fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies.

[14] He was replaced as Head of the department by Vicki Mahaffey in 2016[15] and accepted a position as the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.