Michael Sperberg-Mcqueen

Michael Sperberg-McQueen, passed suddenly, on August 16, 2024. Michael was born to Lawrence and Miriam Culler Sperberg on Borger, Texas, on May 18, 1954. He grew up in El Paso. A year spent as an exchange student in Hanover, Germany, after high school helped shape his life. He attended Stanford, where he was able to pursue a wide range of interests, from mathematics, to drama, to medieval literature and computing. He met Marian at Stanford, and they married in 1979. 

  In about 1982 he became the first humanities computing consultant at Princeton University. In 1986 he and Marian relocated to Chicago where he became a co-editor of the Text Encoding Initiative. He was passionate about developing tools that would ensure the digital preservation of cultural heritage. Michael and Marian returned to the southwest in 1999 to live in the house her father built south of Española, and Michael began working for the World Wide Web Consortium. In 2008 he began his own IT consulting firm, Black Mesa Technologies. He traveled frequently to conferences world wide and was for many years a co-chair of the annual Balisage conference, where his closing remarks were always much anticipated. He enjoyed especially a semester as a visiting professor at the Program in Digital Humanities at the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, in 2015. 

   In the aftermath of the 2016 election, he desperately wanted to help return the country to its senses. As always, he did the research, which told him he could be most effective thinking nationally but acting locally.

  His engagement in progressive politics in Rio Arriba County and New Mexico brought him much stimulation and satisfaction, and many friends.

Michael had a prodigious memory, a keen intelligence, and an extraordinary range of interests. Reading was almost as important as breathing to him; intellectual engagement with others was his great joy. He believed that no knowledge is useless, and no person lacks knowledge. He was a big man with a big heart and a gift for friendship.

  Michael was preceded in death by his mother and father and by his brother Ron. He leaves his wife, Marian, his stepmother, Elvira, and his siblings Barb, Nancy, Roger, Fritz, Oliver, Rosa, Rudy, and Flora. Also, his beloved dog, Beabos, and felines Curt, Fussbudget, and Cholmondeley.