Ben Wiebracht
English Instructor
I earned my Ph.D. in English from Stanford in 2015, and, after bouncing around the university for a few years teaching for this and that program, I found my home at the wonderful, one-of-a-kind school that is Stanford OHS. Here, I teach the final two courses in the English core curriculum: “Modes of Writing and Argumentation” and “Critical Theory.” My particular section of Critical Theory is entitled “Canon and Counter-Canon”: students study the work of well-known and neglected authors side by side and by doing so gain a richer understanding of literary periods and genres. I also teach an Advanced Topics course on Jane Austen, my favorite novelist, whenever the opportunity arises.
For the past few years, Austen and her world have also been the focus of much of my research. My current project is a series of books called Forgotten Contemporaries of Jane Austen. Each book is a critical edition of a work by one of Austen’s lesser-known contemporaries, annotated so as to shed light on Austen’s life and novels. The goal is to see Austen as part of the wildly diverse, rapidly evolving literary community of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a community that the “great authors” approach to the period tends to marginalize or erase altogether. I create these books in full collaboration with my Advanced Topics students, who are credited as co-editors. The second volume in the series, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, won the 2023-4 MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition.
In my view, literary scholarship and the humanities as a whole would benefit if students and scholars worked together more often. It was with this conviction that three other Stanford OHS teachers and I founded Pixelia Publishing, a non-profit, open-access publisher that provides a platform for student-teacher collaborations. You can learn more about Pixelia’s activities, including recent publications, at pixeliapublishing.org.
Outside work, I enjoy board-gaming, hiking, book-collecting, and painting little plastic figurines for use in DND campaigns—but most of all just spending time with my wife Michelle and two kiddos, James and Eva.
Publications
Publications (collaborations with Stanford OHS students are in bold font; open-access publications are linked)
“Jane Austen, Doctor Syntax, and the Mass Market,” Persuasions On-line 45.1 (Winter 2024). With co-editors Madeline Ayer, Aidan Bekendam, Mayuko Karakawa, Sabine Mazzeo, Rathan Muruganantham, Annika Ross, Nicolás Zepeda, and Jiayun Zhang.
The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (Pixelia Publishing, 2024). With co-editors Madeline Ayer, Aidan Bekendam, Jacob Bryant, Ferris Haukom, Mayuko Karakawa, Edithe Lam, Sabine Mazzeo, Rathan Muruganantham, Isabella Romagnoli, Annika Ross, April Wen, Silas Wesner, Noelle Wu, Ethan Yun, Nicolás Zepeda, and Jiayun Zhang.
“Tennyson and the Troubled Manliness of Victorian Doubt,” Religion and Literature 56.1 (Spring 2024). With co-author Amir Tevel.
“The Flattering Milliner, Lost Play by William Combe, Discovered,” Notes & Queries 70.4 (Dec. 2023): 282-286. With co-author Rathan Muruganantham.
“Jane Austen and Student-Teacher Collaborations: How One High-school English Class Ditched Graded Essays for Something Better,” Persuasions On-line 43.1 (Winter 2022). With co-authors Macy Maurer Levin, Kate Snyder, and Varsha Venkatram.
Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme (Pixelia Publishing, 2021). With co-editors Josephine Chan, Carolyn Engargiola, Macy Maurer Levin, Sophia Romagnoli, Kate Snyder, and Varsha Venkatram.
“A Day in Catherine Morland’s Bath” (Jane Austen’s World, Jan. 4, 2021). With co-authors LiYuan Byrne, Josephine Chan, Ariana Desai, Carolyn Engargiola, Ava Giles, Macy Maurer Levin, Gage Miles, Sophia Romagnoli, Kate Snyder, Oscar Steinhardt, Lauren Stoneman, Alexandria Thomas, and Varsha Venkatram.
“Teaching Nineteenth-Century Novels to Today’s Teens,” Dickens Studies Annual 52.1 (2021): 138-162. With co-authors Vincent Lankewish, Jacqueline Jean Barrios, Michelle Boswell, Geoffrey Schramm, and Lissette Lopez Szwydky.
“Adonis in Fairyland: The Hazards of Boyhood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare 16.4 (Sept 2020): 340-355. With research assistant Zachary Stein-Perlman.
“Love in the Time of Chartism: Ideology and Romance in the Victorian Social-Problem Novel,” Nineteenth Century Studies 31 (2019): 61-78.
“The Vile Conclusion: Crises of Resolution in Shakespeare’s Love Plots,” Shakespeare 12.3 (Sept 2016): 241-259.
“First-Cousin Marriage in Tudor and Stuart England: 1540-1688,” Journal of Family History 40.1 (Jan 2015): 24-38.