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, UC Berkeley
On September 2, 2025, I started a new position at UC Berkeley School of Information. For 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.
Poster Award at CCLS2026
Our poster won third prize in the Best Poster Award at CCLS2026 in Potsdam. Thank you for the enriching discussions at the poster gallery. You can access our poster digitally on Zenodo.
Acceptance to TADA 2026
Super excited to present my poster "Suspense in Short Fiction: Testing Theory Pluralism against LLMs’ Intrinsic Concepts" at TADA 2026, UC Berkeley, on October 5. More information on the project can be found on my GitHub: SvenjaGuhr/Suspense_in_Shorts.
Upcoming or Latest Talks and Workshops
July 2026
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01.-07.07.
Participation in the NLP4DH Workshop at ACL 2026 in San Diego, USA -
04.07., 15:15 (PST)
Talk on "Between Whispers and Screams: Loudness SD as a Proxy for Explicit Content Detection" at the NLP4DH Workshop at ACL 2026 in San Diego, USA
September 2026
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11.09., 12:00-14:00 (PST)
CARL, the Cultural Analytics Research Lab, is back: Together with our guest, Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis, I prepared a workshop on "When Does LLM-Annotation Become Science?", AI Futures Lab, UC Berkeley, USA
October 2026
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05.10.
Presentation of my poster "Suspense in Short Fiction: Testing Theory Pluralism against LLMs’ Intrinsic Concepts" at TADA 2026 -
07.10., 14:00 (PST)
"Analysing Sound and Loudness in Novels by Henry James and Marcel Proust", invited talk in Prof. Michael Lucey's class Approaches to Genre: The Novel. Points of View and/on Sound in Novels", at the Department of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley, USA -
13.10., 13:30 (CEST)
Talk at University of Graz, Austria (tbc) -
31.10., 16:30-21:30 (CEST)
I co-organize the event "A Musical Evening around Love in the Novel" as part of the "Lese- und Lauschfestival", celebrating 150 years of the City Library Freiberg, Germany
