Professor of German
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Comparative Studies

Steven Joyce teaches courses in introductory and intermediate German language as well as courses in comparative studies.  His topics of research reflect his interest in German language and literature as well his background in comparative literature.  His published works range in scope from work on the rehearsal copies of George Bernard Shaw’s last fully fledged play Buoyant Billions to articles on Thomas Bernhard’s Alte Meister and Heldenplatz to a book of essays and several books of poetry.

He is currently working on a monograph of Judith Hermann’s Nichts als Gespenster (Nothing but Ghosts) that examines the work in terms of ambient romance.  Many of the stories in Judith Hermann’s acclaimed collection of short stories entitled Nichts als Gespenster (Nothing but Ghosts) depict characters loveless and adrift in a global world that effectively neutralizes their sense of self and their collective sense of nationality and culture. While the themes of existential ennui, longing, desire, and the search for identity are not new in literature, Hermann’s stories, seen through the lens of ambient romanticism, reveal a paradigm shift that implicates the effect the global economic order has on form and development of human relationships of intimacy and romance.  The prospective monograph cites early German romantic thought and draws on the research of Eva Illouz, Anthony Giddens, Corey Keyes, Niklas Luhmann, Frederick Beiser, and others to lend cogency to the analysis of ambient romance in Hermann’s work.

His first book Transformations and Texts: The Rehearsal Copies of G.B. Shaw’s Buoyant Billions Transformations and texts : G.B. Shaw's Buoyant billions : Joyce, Steven, 1950- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive  is a comprehensive study of one of Shaw's least known plays. In addition to the typescript held by the British Library, Dr. Joyce has made a detailed examination of several rehearsal copies of the play issued for the Malvern Festival in 1949. Useful critical approaches are applied to the play including thematism, semiotics and speech-act theory making this a comprehensive analysis of a significant late work.

A second book entitled The Winds of Ilion THE WINDS OF ILION — EyeCorner Press is a collection of essays, articles, memoir, creative nonfiction and poetry that combines many different creative threads, weaving a fabric of meanings whose scope extends to the disparate events and marginal circumstances both of literary and everyday life.  The work received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in 2014.

Dr. Joyce has also published three books of poetry—The Apostate Djin (2013) The Apostate Djin – Kelsay Books, A Sea of Other (2018),  A Sea of Other – Kelsay Books, and A Small Pad of Paper (2021) A Small Pad of Paper – Kelsay Books reflecting his interest in creative writing.

In addition to the Judith Hermann monograph, he is working on another book of poetry tentatively entitled Indentured Intimacies and a collection of essays and articles entitled The Prophet of Patmos.