Mark Schoenfield

Email (mark.schoenfield@vanderbilt.edu)
615-322-2327
300 Benson Science Hall
Vanderbilt University
Nashville,Tennessee 37235

LinkedIn: Mark Schoenfield

Memorial Howard

I am the Robert Penn Warren Professor of the Humanities and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University, where I received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Humanities.  My first book explores William Wordsworth’s connection to the law, and the next, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The "Literary Lower Empire” won the Colby Prize for outstanding work on 19th century periodicals.  I've 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.  My teaching interests include law and literature, romanticism, the novel, and existential fictions.  I coach and have refereed high school wrestling, and taught chess to middle-school aspiring tournament players.

My current research interests expand upon and merge some of my prior interests.  Two current project 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. I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for this work.  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.

Education

  • Ph.D. and M.P.W (MFA equivalent)., University of Southern California
  • B.A. Yale University, majorsof English and Philosophy

Representative publications

  •  “Catechism, Cross-examination, and Other Questions in The Entail”_John Galt, Universal Traveller: Critical Essays on His Works Eds. Angela Esterhammer, Robert P. Irvine, and Gerard Lee McKeever. Edinburgh University Press. Forthcoming, 2026. 
  • “The Lawyer in the Novel” The Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature. Eds. Simon Stern and Robert Spoo., Edwin Elgar, 2025; available for purchase Dec. 2024. 295-299. 
  • “The Legal Character of Paupers” British Law and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ed. Melissa Ganz. Cambridge University Press, 2025. 187-208. 
  • “Biography,” Coauthor, Alec Jordan (Vanderbilt undergrad, appx 2016). The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose Ed. Robert Morrison. Oxford University Press, March 2024. 383-400. 
  • “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. 41-68 
  • “Henry Brougham Per(for)ming the Defense, Trial by Media: The Queen Caroline Affair.” Green Bag An Entertaining Journal of Law 23 (Spring 2020) 249-256. Series based on the Lewis Walpole Library/Yale Law School website Exhibition, 2020.  
  • "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.
  • “Existential Jigsaws.” Best Lesson series, Course Hero Faculty Club, 2019
  • "Coleridge Among the Periodicals” co-authored with Alec Jordan, BA, Vanderbilt '14.   Coleridge: Critical Readings, 2016
  • “The Trial of James Stuart (1822): ‘Abuse of the Press, and Duelling.’” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, 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
  • "A Performance of Difference: The Public Image of Daniel Mendoza" Romanticism and "The Jewish Question": Nationalism, Religion, Individualism.
  • Playing with Logic, Discovering Logic, Adventures with Logic (three grade-school activity books, co-authored with J. Rosenblatt), San Francisco: Lake Publishers, 1985.

Select Recent Talks

  • “‘The Shortest Way with Juries’: Periodicals and the Triers of Facts” Law, Culture, and the Humanities Conference, Georgetown Law School, June 2025.
  • “The Lawyer and the Pauper” Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Conference, New Orleans, March 2025
  • “The Spirits of The Law: The Trials of Hazlitt’s ‘Contemporary Portraits’” MLA, New Orleans, 2025.
  • “Laughing with the Legal Leddy: Editing the Entail. British Association of Romantic Studies. Glasgow, Scotland, July, 2024.
  • “The Lawyer in Fine Form” INCS Conference, Trans(–)Turns in Nineteenth-Century Studies March 2024
  • From Netsblox to Spark…and back again” Co-author (tertiary) with Brian Broll, Cliff Anderson, and Corey Brady. Snap!Con 2021. July, 2021.
  • Featured panel participant: “Assessment and Learning”  What Happens Now? Course Hero Virtual Education Summit '20.  July, 2021