David Oberhelman

co-author of Presentations of the 2010 Upstate Steampunk Extravaganza and Meetup

February 4, 2012

David D. Oberhelman is a professor in the Humanities-Social Science Division of the OSU Library, and prior to that was on the faculty in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He holds a PhD in English with an emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. In the field of literary criticism he has co-edited a book on fantasy and Native American literature, authored a book on madness in the fiction of Charles Dickens, and published articles and chapters on the nineteenth-century British novel and twentieth-century fantasy literature, particularly the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. Oberhelman has held leadership positions in many national-level library and literary associations such as the Modern Language Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Mythopoeic Society. He has published and presented widely on library and information science topics ranging from digital humanities and other emerging technologies in libraries, information literacy instruction, trends in scholarly communication, and the history of the book and print culture.

Steampunk is a juxtaposition of science fiction, fantasy, and Victorian alternate history. Its roots are in the literature and architecture of the late 19th century while having its branches reach into the future. This proceedings volume brings together the papers presented at the first conference of its kind on the Steampunk genre held in Greenville, South Carolina in November 2010.

My paper in the volume is entitled "Out of the Unknown Past into the Unknown Future": Information Technology and Degradation in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. In it I argue that Well's dystopian science fiction novel The Time Machine is a Victorian parable of the failure of what we might term information technology and degradation – the breakdown of communication or the erosion of the cultural and scientific record that severs the link between future civilizations and their previous heritage. The novel thus anticipates some of the concerns facing our own time about the preservation of information in print and electronic formats and the limits of our own data storage technology.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2012-honorees/david-oberhelman

Last Updated: 12 January 2022