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
Svenja Guhr is a Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where her research bridges applied natural language processing and literary studies. She focuses on the operationalization of literary phenomena, developing systematic methods to measure concepts like “sound,” “loudness,” and “suspense” in multilingual fiction. Previously a researcher at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Literary Lab, she now leads a project investigating the modeling of suspense in American and British short fiction.
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 I School, UCB
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
March 2026
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19.03., 9:30 (PT)
"Whispers, Alarms, and Heartbeats: A Sound Analysis of the Men Made in America Series", talk at the "Cultural Analytics Week on Multimodal Models for the Study of Culture", School of Information / AI Futures Lab, UC Berkeley, USA
April 2026
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15.-22.04.
Invited Talk and CATMA Workshop in the Department of English at the University of Wyoming, USA
May 2026
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20.05., 11:40 (CEST)
Guest Lecture on "Annotation Guidelines" at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany -
26.05., 10:00 (CEST)
Invited Talk on "Listening to Fiction: Tracing Sound and Loudness in Narrative" in the Colloquium "LiLi revisited: Digitale Schnittstellenforschung zwischen Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik" at the University of Bielefeld, Germany -
28.-29.05.
Participation in the 5th Annual Conference of Computational Literary Studies (CCLS) with Poster Presentation at the University of Potsdam, Germany
