Team

Benjamin Robbins (Project Leader) is a senior postdoctoral researcher in American literary and cultural studies within the Department for American Studies at the University of Innsbruck. He is the author of Faulkner's Hollywood Novels: Women between Page and Screen (University of Virginia Press, August 2024). His work in the research areas of modernism, popular culture, and queer and gender studies has appeared in the Journal of Screenwriting, the Faulkner Journal, and Genre, and in the edited collections Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas and Hipster Culture. He is a senior collaborating editor for Digital Yoknapatawpha, a project based at the University of Virginia that has created network visualizations, interactive maps, and timelines for William Faulkner’s fictions. His work on the digital humanities has been published in Studies in American Culture (which received the Jerome Stern Award) and Digitizing Faulkner.

National and International Cooperation Partners

Joseph Allen Boone is the Endowed Gender Studies Professor of Gender and Media in the English Department at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is the author of three scholarly books, including 2015's The Homoerotics of Orientalism, and the 2022 novel, Furnace Creek, which reimagines Dickens' Pip as a queer youth growing up in the rural American South of the 1960-70s. He has edited two collections on gender and queer theory, as well as written the libretto to a musical, CONMAN!, and he is completing a book on contemporary manifestations of Melville in multimedia art forms. A short story collection is forthcoming in 2023, and Boone has held fellowships from the Guggenheim, ACLS, NEH, Stanford Humanties Center, National Humanities Center, Bellagio, and Bogliasco foundations.

Heather Love is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses in gender and sexuality studies, twentieth-century literature and culture, affect studies, sociology and literature, disability studies, film and visual culture, and critical theory. She is the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard) and the editor of a special issue of GLQ on Gayle Rubin (“Rethinking Sex”) and the co-editor of a special issue of Representations ("Description Across Disciplines"). She has written on topics including comparative social stigma, compulsory happiness, transgender fiction, spinster aesthetics, and reading methods in literary studies. Underdogs: social Deviance and Queer Theory (University of Chicago Press) came out in Fall 2021. She is currently at work on a project on the uses of the personal in academic criticism.

Worthy N. Martin, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas-Austin in 1981. He then joined the University of Virginia in 1982 as a professor of Computer Science. For over 20 years he has had a substantial research appointment with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) and is currently Director of IATH. Martin is the primary information architect on numerous digital humanities projects through IATH. A partial list of those projects includes: The Chaco Research Archive, Digital Yoknapatawpha, The Collective Biographies of Women, The Life of the Buddha, Voting Viva Voce: Unlocking the social Logic of Past Politics, Jefferson's University - Early Life Project, 1819-1870, Soundscape Architecture, social Networks in Archival Context, The Independent Works of William Tyndale, and Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection.

Ralph Poole is an American-German researcher who teaches as Professor of American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Originally a trained literary and musicologist scholar, he has moved into the fields of gender and cultural studies. He taught at the University of Munich, Germany, at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey, and was a research scholar at CUNY’s Center for Advanced Studies in Theater Arts in Manhattan. His book publications include a monograph on eating disorders in the work of Margaret Atwood, a study on performing bodies in the Avant-Garde theater tradition, a book on satirical and autoethnographical “cannibal” texts, a collection of essays on “dangerous masculinities”, and another collection on “queer Turkey.” Having wrapped up a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund on “Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution”, he is currently researching the Austrian Heimatfilm from a trans-European perspective. His research interests include gender and queer studies, popular culture, and transnational American studies.

Stephen Railton is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Virginia. After almost 50 years teaching American literature at the University of Virginia, Railton has been retired from the classroom since 2019, but he still spends a lot of time in virtual reality, where he has been exploring the uses of electronic technology for the study of literature and culture since 1996. Digital Yoknapatawpha is his fourth major DH project. Others include Mark Twain In His Times, Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture, and Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive.

John Carlos Rowe is USC Associates’ Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of eleven books, more than 200 essays and reviews, and editor or co-editor of twelve books, including: Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (2000), A Concise Companion to American Studies (2010), Afterlives of Modernism (2011), The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies (2012), and Our Henry James in Fiction, Film, and Popular Culture (2022).

Robyn Warhol is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. A feminist narratologist and specialist in serialized Victorian novels and television shows, she received the 2022 Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative for her contributions to narrative theory. She has most recently published The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, co-edited with Zara Dinnen (EUP), Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Ohio State University Press), co-edited with Susan S. Lanser, and Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (Edinburgh UP), which was co-authored with Helena Michie and was the winner of the 2015 NAVSA Best Book of the Year Award. Her current project is a new, improved version of “Reading like a Victorian,” a website facilitating synchronic reading of 19^th-century British serial novels, at readinglikeavictorian.osu.edu .

Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies in the Department of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.