Sean DiLeonardi, PhD

Dr. Sean DiLeonardi (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is assistant professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. He is associated with the Center for the Digital Text and teaches courses in American Literature, digital humanities, contemporary fiction, Modernism, and popular culture, including detective fiction and film.

Sean’s research examines the aesthetics and institutions of contemporary literature, clarifying how literary forms, such as the novel, shape and are themselves shaped by histories of media, technology, science, and mathematics. His peer-reviewed scholarship explores literature’s relationship to machine translation, artificial intelligence, and the history of quantification, and appears most recently in Post45 and Twentieth-Century Literature (forthcoming).

Currently, Sean is involved in several collaborative and interdisciplinary digital projects. Together with digital humanists at Emory University, he is developing a dataset of bestseller lists from around the world to clarify a neglected category of the contemporary publishing industry: the international bestseller. The project aims to use cultural analytics to track the relative imports and exports of bestsellers across the globe and to understand when the international bestseller emerged, how it operates, and which authors it privileges. Additionally, Sean is helping build an interactive website for an NEH-funded project at Pitt-Greensburg dedicated to producing a set of scholarly translations of treaties between the Chilean state and the Mapuche peoples.

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 Mental Arithmetic.