Robert Torrance's wide ranging research and teaching interests include literature, philosophy, and science of different cultures (especially, but not only, in the Western tradition) from ancient times to the present. He taught courses on classical Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, the modern novel, and contemporary literary criticism and theory. Among his books are translations of two plays of Sophocles ("Philocetetes" and "The Women of Trachis"); The Comic Hero; Ideal and Spleen: The Crisis of Transcendent Vision of Romantic, Symbolist, and Modern Poetry; The Spiritual Quest:Transcendence in Myth, Religion, and Science. He also wrote the major anthology Encompassing Nature: Nature and Culture from Ancient Times to the Modern World, which is used in the NAC core curriculum course, Comparative Literature 20.