Martin P. Sheehan is incoming Department Head and Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona. His research examines the ways that literature and other media forms shape how bodies, identities, and social differences are perceived across nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture. His scholarship has appeared in Seminar, Colloquia Germanica, Studia Neophilologica, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Archiv, as well as in The Routledge Companion to Literary Media. With Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez, he co-edited Moving Frames: Photographs in German Cinema, a volume that investigates the aesthetic, narrative, and theoretical significance of photography in German film.
His current projects investigate how disability intersects with gender in German drama and how visual and administrative technologies organize bodies and social relations during Germany’s Weimar era. He also creates scholarly video games that use interactive systems to explore a range of historical experiences. Paper Empire uses the mechanics and aesthetics of incremental games to explore everyday life during Weimar hyperinflation, while Kafka Teaches Typing, a modification of the border control game Papers, Please, translates the reality of Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic position at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague into procedural gameplay. Across this work, he considers how media forms structure perception and assign cultural meaning to embodied difference.
A former co-director of the German Studies Association’s Digital Humanities Network, Sheehan has organized seminars and workshops on social network analysis and forms of computational creativity. He has also helped develop interdisciplinary academic programs that connect the humanities with computing and engineering.
As an educator and researcher, he has received support from the Max Kade Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service, and he has presented his work at Harvard University, Georgetown University, and the University of Oxford. Before joining the University of Arizona, he held positions at the University of Virginia and TU Dortmund. He also chaired the Department of Foreign Languages at Tennessee Tech University for nearly a decade. A native of South Carolina, he now calls the Southwest home, where he continues to collect, restore, and write with mechanical typewriters.