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 American Literature, digital humanities, modernism, and popular culture, including detective fiction and film.
Sean's research takes on a broad definition of the Americas and an equally capacious understanding of digital media to examine modes of mediation, both technical and aesthetic. His book project, The Limits of Literature, traces how long-held categories that mark the boundaries of not only aesthetics but human subjectivity, such as the sublime and the ineffable, accommodate new modes of representation when pressed against the backdrop of digital computation. A second project on international bestsellers is a collaborative venture, working across academic and public-facing genres, centered on how data analytics can clarify the history of the international bestseller in the U.S. Finally, Sean is part of "Chilean Parlamentos," an NEH-funded collaboration with colleagues in Latin American history to produce an interactive digital environment for exploring scholarly translations of treaties between colonial Spain and the Mapuche peoples of modern day Chile.
His peer-reviewed scholarship appears in Post45 and Twentieth-Century Literature and is forthcoming from Studies in the Novel. 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.
