18.05.1954 – 16.08.2024
It is with great sadness that the Institute of Linguistics and Literary Studies of TU Darmstadt has learned that C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, medievalist, digital humanist, mark-up expert extraordinaire, teacher, scholar and friend, has passed away.
In 2015, the institute had the great honour of welcoming Michael as Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities at TU Darmstadt. For a whole semester, it was our privilege to have Michael in our midst. He generously gave of his time and knowledge not only to our students, but to any one of us in conversation, talks and social events. He was an inspiration to our students who, in no time at all, became his students and who will never forget the projects he inspired them to work on and the knowledge and insight he shared not only about text encoding, but about language and text, theory and representation.
He joined the institute so seamlessly as if he had always been a part of it. Thousands of miles away from his home and his dear wife Marian, he took up temporary residence in TU Darmstadt’s Lichtenberg-Haus, set up his office in our institute in Landwehrstraße and, without further ado, set to work. Teaching classes on the “Challenges of electronic publishing” and “Die Suche nach der vollkommenen Sprache”, he instantly hit it off with our students who loved his style of teaching, his immense learning and experience in digital scholarship and a multitude of other areas of learning which he shared with them freely and generously. He supervised MA thesis projects, mentored students of linguistic and literary computing and valiantly battled the administrative idiosyncrasies of the German academic system alongside the rest of us.
Most of us had met Michael in different contexts over the years, as medievalists, digital humanists, linguists, literary scholars and digital philologists; many of us had befriended Michael before we even knew each other; all of us are united in our deep admiration for his scholarship and his exceptional, warm-hearted, generous, intellectually and personally inspiring personality.
Michael will always be a member of our institute and will remain in our hearts as a wonderful person, as our role model and mentor. We mourn an exceptional scholar, a true gentleman and a dear friend.