International Bestsellers

From the 2023-24 Award Showcase in Oakland on September 18th, 2024 where Dr. Sean DiLeonardi and RA Jed Kudrick presented their poster on international bestsellers.

Official project website forthcoming

The International Bestsellers project is a collaborative endeavor to create, share, and analyze scholarly datasets about international bestsellers in fiction. More than ever, novels that become bestsellers often circulate the globe, spurred by multinational publishers, translation networks, literary agencies, social media, and other key factors in twenty-first-century publishing. Even basic access to information about this literary phenomenon is restricted, limiting how scholars of contemporary literature and publishing understand them and their significance to reading habits around the world. The IB project collects bestseller lists, supplements them with additional data, and aggregates them for the purposes of scholarly research.

The project has produced two original datasets and several conference presentations, public writings, and peer-reviewed publications. Pitt-Greensburg student Jed Kudrick (Creative & Professional Writing) worked on the project, first as a Research Assistant and then as a Green Scholar throughout 2024-25. He conducted research to complete one dataset, prepared it for analysis, and composed an essay detailing some initial findings, which is forthcoming. Some of the project outputs are made available below:

Pitt-Greensburg Faculty Sponsors

External Project Members