Stefan Schöberlein, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of English and the Digital Humanities at Marshall University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2018. Stefan specializes in the intersections of science, literature, and technology in the nineteenth century. Conceptually, His work is indebted to post-structuralist media-theoretical frameworks and the history of science in literature. Stefan’s research has been published in journals like American Literature, ISLE, and the Journal of American Studies and has been awarded several prizes at Iowa and Marshall. While he has published largely on US authors, in particular Whitman and Dickinson, his first book (based on his dissertation) will take on a more transatlantic focus. For this project, he will discuss the brain as a discourse functionary in Anglophone literatures of the 1800s.
Another focus of Stefan’s work lies digital editing using Extensible Markup Language (xml) and authorship assessment using R. His research on the latter has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. During this graduate studies at the University of Iowa, Stefan has completed the its Public Digital Humanities Certificate in 2017 and was an Obermann Graduate Institute Fellow. He also worked for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and the Walt Whitman Archive.
Stefan also holds a M.Ed. in Special Education from TU Dortmund University (Germany), where he has designed and taught undergraduate classes in American literature. At Marshall, Stefan has taught classes in the English major, graduate seminars on media theory, and the introduction to the Digital Humanities minor. He is one of the co-editors of the Movable project, a platform for people in Appalachia and beyond to share, highlight, and document stories of recovery from substance-use disorder (funded by the West Virginia Humanities Council and SAMHSA).
You can read about Stefan’s past dissertation and future book manuscript in this interview or read about his work on Whitman here, here (also in German), and here. Stefan’s work has won a number of prizes, including Iowa’s Graduate Student Research Excellence Award in Arts and Humanities as well as its D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize. Stefan’s translation of Walt Whitman’s novella Jack Engle into German was published in 2017 (Das abenteuerliche Leben des Jack Engle, Berlin: Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis).