Michael Sperberg-McQueen

C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen (May 18, 1954 – August 16, 2024) was an American medieval German philologist and markup language specialist. He co-founded and co-chaired Extreme Markup Languages, later known as Balisage: The Markup Conference, and was the principal of Black Mesa Technologies. Sperberg-McQueen served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification (1998) and chaired both the W3C XML Coordination Group and the XML Schema Working Group. He was instrumental in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), an international project developing guidelines for electronic text encoding, and co-edited the TEI's Guidelines with Lou Burnard in 1994. He served as TEI editor-in-chief from 1988 to 2000.

Sperberg-McQueen held a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and taught extensively on markup systems, formal languages, and semantic theory. In 2015, he was a visiting professor at Technische Universität Darmstadt, teaching Digital Humanities. He contributed to various W3C activities, including XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, and XQuery, and participated in community groups working on Invisible XML and updates to these technologies.

His education included studies at the University of Bonn, Free University of Berlin, Stanford University (A.B., A.M.), Paris-Sorbonne University, and University of Göttingen. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford for a dissertation on Nibelungenlied Poetics in 1985. Sperberg-McQueen died at 70, leaving a legacy in digital humanities and markup languages.