Patrick Erben, Ph.D.

Professor & English Program Coordinator
School of Humanities College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

678-839-6144
perben@westga.8BBOxz8cFtxoaNH9pZUtnOAfl3EVCXl0LIbPWx38y1m1yfPSlyuyXkxjedu

Boyd Building - Room 316
Office Hours
Fall 2024: MON/WED 10:00AM-12:00PM; TUE/THU—ONLINE OR IN PERSON BY APPOINTMENT (email perben@westga.edu).

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Patrick Erben, Ph.D.

I am an early Americanist with a specific interest in multilingualism, translation, and the literatures of non-English immigration. As a former president of the Society of Early Americanists and editorial board member of the journal Early American Literature, I continue fostering the work I began when I organized the 2021 Biennial Conference of the SEA--to highlight and support diverse scholars, teachers, students, and programs and thus make the field of early American studies more inclusive. I am also the English Program Coordinator in the School of Humanities at the University of West Georgia; in this role, I seek to strengthen the study of language, literature, and culture at the university and in the community.  

A native of Germany, I attended Johannes Gutenberg Universität in Mainz and graduated with an M.A. in American Studies in 1997 and completed my Ph.D. at Emory University in 2003. During a two-year NEH fellowship at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, I researched and wrote my first monograph, A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania (University of North Carolina Press, 2012, 2017 paperback). A Harmony of the Spirits demonstrates that translation served as a practical tool and as a spiritual ideal for discovering and establishing links between seemingly incoherent languages, religious doctrines, genders, and ethnicities. I also published the first scholarly edition of the writings of Francis Daniel Pastorius, the founder of Germantown, Pennsylvania (the first German settlement in North America), with Penn State University Press, entitled The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader: Writings by an Early American Polymath. My next monograph project will focus on the German Pietist influences on major works in early American literature, a project for which I just completed a research fellowship with the American Antiquarian Society. With my colleague Rebecca Harrison, I am currently co-editing a collection of scholarly essays entitled Early America and the Modern Imagination: Rewriting the Past in the Present, which is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in Spring 2025. 

Currently, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in early American literature, publishing and editing, as well as world literature at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton. 

  • M.A., American Studies, Johannes Gutenberg Univ., 1997
  • Ph.D., English, Emory University, 2003

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Babel of the Atlantic. Ed. Bethany Wiggin. The Pennsylvania State University Press, May 2019. [View Publication External Resource]

MONOGRAPH: _A Harmony of the Spirits: Translation and the Language of Community in Early Pennsylvania_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). [View Publication External Resource]

TEXTUAL EDITION: A Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader. Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. [View Publication External Resource]

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES:

Re-Discovering the German-Language Literature of Colonial America. In: _A Peculiar Mixture: German-Speaking People in the Greater Mid-Atlantic Region from 1709 to the Revolution_, eds. Oliver Scheiding and Jan Stievermann (forthcoming with Penn State UP)

The Translingual Archive. In: _Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives._ MLA Options for Teaching Series. Eds. Heidi Brayman Hackel and Ian Frederick Moulton. (Forthcoming: MLA, 2012).

Book of Suffering, Suffering Book: The Mennonite Martyrs Mirror and the Translation of Martyrdom in Colonial Pennsylvania [View Publication External Resource]

Educating Germans in Colonial Pennsylvania [View Publication External Resource]

Promoting Pennsylvania: Penn, Pastorius, and the Creation of a Transnational Community. _Resources for American Literary Study 29_ (2003-2004; published 2005): 25-65.

Honey-Combs and Paper-Hives: Positioning Francis Daniel Pastorius Manuscript Writings in Early Pennsylvania [View Publication External Resource]