Sean DiLeonardi earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is assistant professor of English and director of the Center for Digital Studies at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where he teaches courses in American and African American Literature, modernism, and digital humanities.
Sean's research takes on a broad definition of American literature and an equally capacious understanding of digital media to examine modes of mediation, both technical and aesthetic, in contemporary culture. His book project, The Digital Sublime, traces how long-held categories that mark the boundaries of not only aesthetics but human subjectivity, such as the sublime and totality, accommodate new modes of representation against the emergence of digital computation. A second project offers both an institutional history and a literary theory of the international bestseller as a distinct twentieth-century development of the novel. A sample of this work was recently featured in Public Books. His peer-reviewed scholarship appears in Post45, Twentieth-Century Literature, and most recently in Studies in the Novel; and an original, peer-reviewed dataset can be found at the Post45 Data Collective.
As director of the Center for Digital Studies, Sean oversees the annual Digital Studies Symposium, is the founder of “Route 30,” a campus-wide podcast on the stories and people of Westmoreland County, and administers several collaborations between students and faculty that combine interdisciplinary research with digital tools and/or methods, including "Parlamentos," an NEH-funded interactive digital environment for exploring scholarly translations of treaties between colonial Spain and the Mapuche peoples of modern day Chile.
Prior to joining Pitt-Greensburg, Sean served as Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress, where he curated an interdisciplinary research guide on arithmetic and numeracy for the Science & Business Reading Room.
