Home | Paul Schacht

About me

Since 1985, I've taught at SUNY Geneseo, where I served as interim provost in 2016-17 and chair of the English department from 2010 to 2015. I'm currently Professor of English and Director of the Center for Digital Learning at Geneseo. I teach courses in Victorian Literature, Humanities, and Digital Humanities.

I'm director of Digital Thoreau, a web resource dedicated to helping readers approach the works of American author Henry David Thoreau the same way he tried to live life: deliberately. At Digital Thoreau, you can read a fluid-text edition of Walden that enables you to follow Thoreau's revisions to the work across seven manuscript versions; join a community of readers in a social network for annotating Thoreau's works collaboratively, and learn about the life and work of Thoreau scholar and SUNY Geneseo Distinguished Professor of English Walter Harding.
With other members of the Digital Thoreau team, I recently co-authored "Encountering Walden" in Scholarly Editing Vol. 39.
Other recent work includes a keyword entry on Annotation to Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, a book project of the Modern Language Association.
I maintain English @ SUNY Geneseo, a learning and shared-interest network built with Commons In a Box, a free plugin for the open-source blogging platform WordPress created and maintained by City University of New York and CUNY Graduate Center.

My blogstuff is scattered in various spaces, including the Center for Digital Learning blog, the SUNY Geneseo wiki and group blogs within the English @ SUNY Geneseo network such as Digital Humanities at Geneseo and Metagogy.

From 2002 to 2010, I chaired SUNY Geneseo's Academic Program Assessment Committee and built a wiki-based assessment platform designed to promote a recording rather than a reporting approach to assessment. I continue to believe that done right, assessment resists rather than promotes the corporatization of higher education.

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