English

Stefanie Sobelle is an Associate Professor of United States literature and culture. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and her B.A. from Stanford University and before coming to Gettysburg taught in New York City at Sarah Lawrence College, Barnard College, Columbia, and the Cooper Union. Her book A Building is a Book, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, is an examination of the architecture in and of American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, and her new projects examine architectural waste and the imaginary of the American desert in Modernist culture.

At Gettysburg, Sobelle's courses focus on 20th- and 21st-century American fiction and poetry, including comparative approaches to the study of US literature. Her additional interests comprise ecocritism, afrofuturism, gender & sexuality studies, critical theory, material culture, and the intersections between literary and visual cultures.

Sobelle was a long-term fellow at the Huntington Library from 2013–14 and a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology in 2019–20. She has written about contemporary literature and art for Bookforum, The Financial Times, BOMB, Jacket 2, The Daily Star, Words without Borders, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues. She has served on the editorial staffs of the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) and The Brooklyn Rail, and she is currently the reviews co-editor of Moderism/moderniy.

Sobelle's work has veered into theater and digital arts, as well: She collaborated with her brother, theater artist Geoff Sobelle, on an award-winning production titled HOME about the memories of houses, which was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and which toured globally for 6 years, and she is currently a partner in an innovative design studio, Imaginary Places, which creates community-oriented, ecologically-minded digital worlds at various universities and arts institutions, most recently integrating augmented reality and generative AI.