This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, RTA 2008, held in Hagenberg, Austria, July 15-17, in June 2008 as part of the RISC Summer 2008. The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 initial submissions. The papers cover current research on all aspects of rewriting including typical areas of interest such as applications, foundational issues, frameworks, implementations, and semantics.