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Department of English

Mark Schoenfield

Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities
Director of Undergraduate Studies

Mark Schoenfield is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University, 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 for outstanding work on 19th-century periodicals.  He has written articles on Byron and marriage (and in each, alluded to the other), as well as on Walter Scott, John Galt, and various periodicals and periodical writers.  His teaching interests include law and literature, romanticism, the novel, and existential fictions, and he is experimenting with alternative forms of student work at all levels of his teaching, including digital story-telling.  He is pleased that three of his publications were co-authored with an undergraduate, a graduate student, and a professor respectively, and he looks forward to continued collaboration.  He has coached and refereed high school wrestling, as well as taught chess to middle-school aspiring tournament players. He is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

His current research interests expand upon and merge some of his prior interests.  His two on-going projects explore law and literature and romantic constructions of the self.  The first, tentatively called The Culture of Litigation: Legal Trials and Romantic Print Culture, 1750–1835, examines how transformations in trials during the romantic period were bolstered and contested in the press and literature of the time, producing celebrity lawyers, novel legal theories, and legal novels.  The second, The Celebrity of the Ordinary: Romantic Autobiography and Periodical Culture, 1790-1840, demonstrates how the extensive fascination with celebrities influence how ordinary people conceptualized and represented their roles and place in the commercial and social orders of the romantic period.

Representative publications

Selected Publications

  • “The Legal Character of Paupers” British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Melissa Ganz. Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024.
  • “Biography,” Coauthor with Alec Jordan, BA, Vanderbilt. The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose Ed. Robert Morrison. Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • “Bodies in Play: Boxing, Dance, and the Science of Recreation.” Co-authored with Kristin Samuelian, George Mason University.  Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America. Eds. Ann Hawkins et al., NYU Press, 2021.
  • “Henry Brougham Per(for)ming the Defense," Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair. Green Bag 23 (Spring 202 . Series based on the Lewis Walpole Library/Yale Law School website Exhibition, 2019. 
  • “Some Grand Secreter”: Secrecy and Exposure in Blackwood’s Magazine.”  Using and Abusing Romantic Periodicals: 12 Case Studies from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Ed. Nicholas Mason and Tom Mole. University of Edinburgh Press, 2020.
  • Invited Blog Article: “Existential Jigsaws.” Best Lesson series Course Hero Faculty Club, 2019.
  •  “The Trial of James Stuart (1822): ‘Abuse of the Press, and Duelling.’” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.  Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, 2015.
  • “Ticklers and Nic-Nacs: weekly entertainments among the Romantic periodicals” Études anglaises.
  • 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.
  • 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 Lawyer in Fine Form” INCS Conference, Trans(–)Turns in Nineteenth-Century Studies March 2024.
  • “Giving away the joke in John Galt’s The Entail” With Clare Simmons. A New John Galt: Editing Galt for the Twenty-First Century. Prague, 3rd World Congress of Scottish Literatures, June, 2022.
  • “Literature in the Time of Coronavirus,” Course Hero Virtual Education Summit '20. July, 2020.
  • “Cross-Examination in the Age of Personalities.” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) Conference, Providence, RI, 2018.