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English Department

Contact Information

Email
phone: 322-2542
331 Benson Science Hall

Office Hours

By Appointment

Mark Schoenfield

Professor
Department Chair

Mark Schoenfield received his BA from Yale and his PhD from the University of Southern California, and is the current chair of the Department of English at Vanderbilt, where he has received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities.  His first book explores William Wordsworth’s connection to the law, and his second,  British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The "Literary Lower Empire” won the Colby Prize.  He has written articles on Byron and marriage (and in each, alluded to the other), as well as on Walter Scott, John Galt, and carious periodicals and periodical writers.  His teaching interests include law and literature, romanticism, the novel, and existential fictions, and he is pleased that four of his publications were co-authored, and looks forward to that number growing.  He has coached and refereed high school wrestling, as well as taught chess to middle-school aspiring tournament players.

My current research interests expand upon and merge some of my prior interest.  My current book project is tentatively called Remarkable Customs: The Institutions of Romantic Print Cultures.  In it, I explore moments of law, economics, and institutions that draw on literary notions of human nature in order to shore up gaps in their own knowledge systems. The title is drawn from a wonderful essay by David Hume that demonstrates that societies negotiate the internal contradictions of their own laws and morals by appealing to disparate institutional frameworks.

Representative publications

(selected)

  • British Periodicals and Romantic Identity:The "Literary Lower Empire" winner of the Colby Prize for outstanding work on 19th century periodicals.
  • The Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet's Contract Georgia UP
  • "Byron in the Satirist." "Romantic Fandom" Praxis volume. Ed. Eric Eisner. Romantic Circles
  • "Periodicals: Aesthetics and Media" Co-authored with Kristin Samuelian, George Mason University. Eds. Julia Wright and Joel Faflak. Handbook to Romanticism Studies.
  • "The Edinburgh Review Set " Ed. Diane Long Hoeveler. Blackwell Encyclopedia of Romanticism, Prose Volume.
  • "A Performance of Difference: The Public Image of Daniel Mendoza" Romanticism and "The Jewish Question": Nationalism, Religion, Individualism.
  • "Romantic Periodicals" Co-authored with Brian Rejack, Vanderbilt University. Literature Compass. Ed. Libby Fay. New York [online]:
  • "The Culture of Comparison: Byron in the Satirist" "Romantic Fandom" Praxis volume. Romantic Circles, 2010
  • "Justice: Romanticism and the Law" in Jon Klancher, ed., A Concise Companion to the Romantic Age. Blackwell Publishing, 2009
  • "Private Souvenirs: Exchanges among Byron's Southwell Set." Wordsworth Circle 2008
  • Nonacademic: Playing with Logic, Discovering Logic, Adventures with Logic (three grade-school activity books, co-authored with J. Rosenblatt), San Francisco: Lake Publishers, 1985.

RECENT TALKS

  • "The Celebrity of the Ordinary: Men and Modes of Fashion" Plenary Speaker, 7th Annual English Graduate Student Conference, University of Tulsa, October, 2012
  • "Romantic Violence in the World of Print" Print in the Media Ecology, Colloquium of the Interacting with Print Research Group. McGill University, March 2012
  • Vanderbilt/McGill Humanities Summit, April 2012. Curb Center for Creativity.
  • "The Taste for Violence in Blackwood's Magazine" plenary address, RSVP, Yale University, 2010.