Dr. Svenja Guhr
Postdoctoral Researcher
Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley School of Information
Founding member of fortext lab, Technical University of Darmstadt
Research Interests: Modern German Literature, Comparative Literature, 18th-21st Century, Gender and Feminism Studies, Sensual Experiences in and through literary text(s) with a focus on Sound and Loudness
Short Introduction
As a multilingual scholar with 7+ years of experience in computational linguistics and literary studies, machine learning, and multilingual digital text analysis (English, German, French, Italian), thinking responsibility and privacy by design, I bring expertise in: natural language processing, language data collection, curation and analysis, data annotation, data quality assessment, taxonomy design, and team management, combined with excellent verbal, editorial, analytical, and teamwork skills.
News
Next Career Step: Postdoc at UCB iSchool
On September 2, I started a new position at UC Berkeley School of Information. For the next two years, I will live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, supporting Prof. David Bamman and the Bamman Group in their exciting research on computational literary studies and cultural analytics.
Acceptance to the DHd 2026 Annual Conference
I look forward to seeing you at the annual DHd conference in Vienna, 23.02.-27.02. Check out our paper: Guhr, S. & Mahlberg, M., "Soundful Dickens. The Narrative Function of Sounds in Dickens’s Fictional Worlds".
Publication of Our Paper in JCLS 4(1)
Wrapping up the LitLab project on the detection of domestic space, Jessica Monaco, Alex Sherman, Mark Algee-Hewitt, and I published our article "Making BERT Feel at Home. Modelling Domestic Space in 19th-Century British and Irish Fiction" with JCLS. You can find it at: 10.48694/jcls.4164.
Upcoming or Latest Talks and Workshops
October 2025
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02.10., 13:45 (CEST)
Invited Talk "Hearing Suspense: Sound, Loudness, and Tension in Romance Novels" at the Workshop on "Narratology and Computational Approaches" at ENS in Paris, France -
06.10., 10:15 (CEST)
Invited Talk "Sounds of Passion: Character Sound and Scene Segmentation in 20th-Century US Romance Fiction" at the Seminar on "Erotic/Dark Romances" at University of Mannheim, Germany -
07-09.10.
Talk "From Annotation to Analysis: A Journey through Scenes, Sounds, and Jupyter Notebooks in CLS" at the DFG-SPP Computational Literary Studies Closing Event at University of Würzburg, Germany -
16.10.
Guest Lecture on "Named Entity Recognition" in "Info 256: Applied Natural Language Processing" at University of California, Berkeley, USA
November 2025
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27.11., 17:30 (CET)
"Genre-blending in Liebesromanen", (online) Talk at the hybrid Workshop "Digitale Gattungshermeneutik II: Gattungen im Kontext" at the German Studies Department of the University of Rostock, Germany
February 2026
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25.-27.02.
"Soundful Dickens. The Narrative Function of Sounds in Dickens's Fictional Worlds", joint talk with Prof. Michaela Mahlberg at the annual DHd conference at the University of Vienna, Austria
