Profile
(Photo credit: Stefan Buddenbohm)
Christof Schöch is Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Trier, Germany, scientific Co-Director of the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH) and co-editor of the Journal of Computational Literary Studies (JCLS). He works at the intersection of Computational Literary Studies and the history of French literature. In the past, he has been president of the Association for Digital Humanities in the German-speaking areas (DHd, 2018–2022) and president of the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO, 2023–2024).
Areas of interest
Christof Schöch’s research interests are located at the confluence of French literary studies and Digital Humanities. His methodological focus is on Computational Literary Studies (quantitative and statistical methods of text analysis, building of digital textual resources). In terms of materials, he is focusing on French Classical and Enlightenment drama as well as on the modern and contemporary French novel. He is also interested in digital forms of scholarly publishing and collaboration, pleads for Open Science practices in the Humanities and is interested in legal concerns and reproducibility relevant to the Digital Humanities. He is an active member of the Romance Studies and Digital Humanities communities.
Academic Activities
Christof Schöch has published in the leading journals in Digital Humanities (including Digital Humanities Quarterly and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities) and regularly contributes to the field’s most important conferences (such as the annual DHd Association conference and the Digital Humanities Conference). He also publishes in innovative formats, ranging from academic blogs and online textbooks to Zotero bibliographies, datasets, and tools. He is frequently invited internationally to deliver keynote lectures, in cities such as Antwerp, Budapest, Cluj, Palermo, and Seoul. He has extensive experience in acquiring and leading interdisciplinary research projects and consortia, from the early-career research group Computational Literary Genre Stylistics (BMBF, 2014–2020) to the European network project Distant Reading for European Literary History (COST Action, 2017–2022) and the collaborative project Mining and Modeling Text (Rhineland-Palatinate Research Initiative, 2019–2023) or two projects in the priority program Computational Literary Studies (DFG, 2020–2027).
Christof Schöch regularly reviews for central journals and conferences in the field, as well as for various national funding organizations. A highlight of his reviewing activities was serving as a panel member for the ERC Consolidator Grants (2017, 2019, 2021). He was also chair of the program committee for the DHd Annual Conference 2020 (Paderborn, DHd2020) and is currently programme committee co-chair for the Digital Humanities Conference 2027 (Galway, DH2027). As long-standing scientific co-director of the TCDH — one of the oldest and largest DH centers in Europe, with over 30 staff members and a wide range of research topics — he has extensive experience in strategic development, personnel management, and budget planning for interdisciplinary teams. He has also been involved in research infrastructure development for the humanities for many years, first as a team member in DARIAH-DE, then as an association representative during the preparatory phase for the NFDI, and currently as a participant in the NFDI consortium Text+. Through conferences, European projects, and his international association work, he is well-connected both in Europe and in Asia (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong).
Education
Christof Schöch studied Romance languages, English and Psychology in Freiburg and Tours. His master’s thesis was on French contemporary writer François Bon. In 2008, he obtained his PhD in French Literature with a study of La Description double dans le roman des Lumières 1760-1800 (binational programme Kassel / Paris IV-Sorbonne). The thesis has been awarded the Prix Germaine de Stael 2010 and has been published with Classiques Garnier.
Positions
From 2004 to 2011, Christof Schöch has been a research assistant at the Institute of Romance Languages and Literatures at Kassel University. From 2011 to 2017, he has been a research associate at the Department for Literary Computing at University of Würzburg, first as a researcher in the DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) inititative, then as leader of the Computational Literary Genre Stylistics group. In 2017, he received the offer to join Trier University as Chair of Digital Humanities.
Detail of activities
My publications, talks, teaching and academic service are documented on a separate Wikibase instance. There, you find lists of talks, publications, classes taught and academic services. You can search, sort and filter them there as well. Or just check out all activities on a map.
Contact
Identifiers
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