Welcome to Sophie

What's New?

Merging Notice

We are currently in the process of merging the holdings of the Sophie Digital Library with the Sophie Scholars Archive, which is hosted by the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. The works by early German-language women in the Scholars Archive are fully transcribed, and appear with publication information and biographies of the authors. Due to recent acquisitions, numerous texts appear in the Sophie Scholars Archive which are not available in the current Sophie Digital Library. The Sophie Scholars Archive can be accessed at Sophie Scholars Archive


Sophie Discovers Amerika

The Sophie Project is excited to announce our newest publication, "Sophie Discovers Amerika," edited by Dr. Rob McFarland and Dr. Michelle Stott James.

In a 1798 novel by Sophie von La Roche, a European woman swims across a cold North American lake seeking help from the local indigenous tribe to deliver a baby. In a 2008 San Francisco travel guide, Milena Moser, the self-proclaimed "Patron Saint of Desperate Swiss Housewives," ponders the guilty pleasures of a media-saturated world. Wildly disparate, these two texts reveal the historical arc of a much larger literary constellation: the literature of German-speaking women who interact with the New World.

In this volume, cultural historians from around the world investigate this unique literary bridge between two hemispheres, focusing on New-World texts written by female authors from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland. Encompassing a broad range of genres including novels, films, travel literature, poetry, erotica, and even photography, the essays include women's experiences across both American continents.



This volume can be purchased from Amazon or directly from the publisher Camden House.

You can read many of the original texts in Sophie Discovers Amerika: The Digital Companion, provided by Alec Down.


Honoring our Scholars!

In addition to recently adding over 1000 new volumes, we have also dedicated several of our collections to scholars in honor of their pioneering work and in appreciation of their generous donations:

The Classen Early (Pre-1750) Collection
The Wildenthal Colonial Literature Collection
The Brinker-Gabler Poetry Collection
The Joeres Biography Collection
The Kord Drama Collection
The Herminghouse Translation Collection
The Christensen Music Library
The Goodman Reference Library
The Blackwell Travel Collection
The Maierhofer Women's Movement Collection


We are working hard to update the library as often as we can. Please contact us if you have anything you'd like to add!

Thank you for visiting the Sophie Digital Library,

Sophie Digital Library

The Sophie Mentored Student Research project aims to incorporate mentored research into undergraduate education. In doing so, students acquire proficiency in library research, document collection, editing, analytical writing as well as expanding their subject knowledge.
 
In doing this, the Sophie Digital Library preserves a number of early German-language creative works which might otherwise be lost, making them easily available from a single source, at no cost to users.
 

  • Bring undergraduates into active participation in significant research as they work with faculty mentors
  • Maintain the Sophie Digital Library as a cost-free source of texts and resources
  • Assist students and scholars of early women's work
  • Foster the establishment of similar projects in other fields
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