We invite you to send your comments to the Archive staff:
Matt Cohen, project co-director, is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His book Whitman's Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution was released by the University of Iowa Press in 2017, and he edited The New Walt Whitman Studies for Cambridge University Press in 2020. For the Archive he has edited "Walt Whitman's Annotations," an edition of and interface for Whitman's marginalia and annotations; Horace Traubel's nine-volume With Walt Whitman in Camden; and, with Rachel Price, the digital version of Álvaro Armando Vasseur's 1912 selection from Leaves of Grass, the first book-length translation of Leaves into Spanish.
Ed Folsom, project co-director, is the Roy J. Carver Professor Emeritus of English at The University of Iowa. Since 1983, he has served as Editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. He edits the Whitman Series for the University of Iowa Press. He is the author or editor of twelve books and many essays on Whitman, including most recently two books of commentary on Whitman's writing, co-authored with Christopher Merrill—Song of Myself (Iowa, 2016) and The Million Dead, Too, Summ'd Up: Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings (Iowa, 2020).
Kenneth M. Price, project co-director, is Hillegass University Professor of American literature at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the co-editor of books on Literary Studies in the Digital Age, James Weldon Johnson, George Santayana, and nineteenth-century periodical literature. With Ed Folsom he co-authored Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Blackwell, 2005). He is also the author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale, 1990); To Walt Whitman, America (North Carolina, 2004); and, most recently Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City (Oxford, 2020).
Brett Barney, senior associate editor, is Research Associate Professor in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He edited a comprehensive collection of Whitman interviews and recollections for the Whitman Archive and co-edited Encyclopedia of American Literature, Volume II: The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1816-1895 (Facts on File, 2008).
Stephanie M. Blalock, associate editor, Walt Whitman Archive; project manager for Whitman Archive grants administered at Iowa, is a Digital Humanities Librarian in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio at the University of Iowa. She also serves as an associate editor for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and The Vault at Pfaff's. She is the author of Go to Pfaff's: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon, a peer-reviewed digital edition published by Lehigh University Press and The Vault at Pfaff's. She has published numerous articles on Whitman and has worked on several projects for the Whitman Archive, including editing (with Nicole Gray) the Fiction Section of Whitman's Published Works.
Kevin McMullen, project manager and associate editor, is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). He has served as the Archive's project manager since 2018, overseeing and coordinating work on all grants administered at UNL. He served as lead writer on the Archive's current NEH grant to identify and digitize Whitman's anonymously authored journalism. His teaching and research focus on nineteenth-century American literature and digital humanities, with a particular emphasis on literary responses to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. He is the co-creator and editor of Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger, an online project digitizing the newspaper columns of Fanny Fern. He also serves as the project manager of the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive.
Tara Ballard is a doctoral student in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Department of English, with a concentration in creative writing. Her research interests revolve around contemporary American women poets, contemporary Middle Eastern poetry, and social poetics. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and the Literary Arts from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a BA in English from the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. Author of House of the Night Watch (New Rivers Press), Tara was the recipient of a Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize in 2019. She is currently a graduate research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive, helping to edit Whitman's journalism.
Caterina Bernardini is a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive and a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. For the Archive, where she worked as a graduate research assistant and a postdoctoral associate from 2011 to 2018, Caterina edited Whitman's correspondence and worked on the Integrated Catalog of Whitman's Literary Manuscripts. She also assisted in the planning of the 2022 symposium focusing on "The Walt Whitman Archive and the Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing." Her interests include nineteenth-century and early modernist American poetry, reception studies, comparative literature, and translation studies. She has published articles in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Willa Cather Newsletter and Review, and in several collections of essays. Her monograph, Transnational Modernity and the Italian Reinvention of Walt Whitman, 1870–1945, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2021 as part of the Iowa Whitman Series.
Karie Cobb, research assistant, is a first year Literary and Cultural Studies M.A. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland. Her research interests include ethnic and women's literature, and her ultimate goal is to bring more attention to the writings of Indigenous women through digitization. She is currently working on transcribing and proofing Whitman's Specimen Days and Collect for the Archive.
Samantha Gilmore is an English doctoral student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an Editorial Assistant at the Whitman Archive. Her academic interests include early-to-mid nineteenth-century American literary and historical studies, digital humanities, archival research, and manuscript culture, specifically surrounding journals/diaries and commonplace books. Samantha's duties at the Whitman Archive include image processing and TEI encoding for the marginalia project.
Jeff Hill is an English M. A. student studying creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he previously obtained a B. S. in education and a certificate in teaching of writing. He is a former high school writing teacher and current faculty member of the Writer's Hotel writing conference in New York City. As a graduate research assistant for the Archive, Jeff has worked on the NEH-funded grant investigating Whitman's mid-career journalism and is currently helping to edit Whitman's Late Life writings.
Brandon James O'Neil completed his PhD at The University of Iowa in Spring 2022. His dissertation, "The Late-Life Whitman: Understanding the Creative Expressions of Senescence," explores Whitman's miscellanies of gathered poetry and prose, November Boughs (1888) and Good-Bye My Fancy (1891). During his time at Iowa, he worked as Managing Editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and as a Research Assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive. His work has appeared in Psychological Perspectives, Quadrant, and Resources for American Literary Study.
Alejandro Omidsalar is an Assistant Professor of English at Allan Hancock College. His research focuses on American horror fiction and ecocriticism. He is a co-editor of "Walt Whitman's Poetry Reprints" and served in the past as Project Manager and Assistant Editor for "Walt Whitman's Annotations."
Ashley Palmer is an Assistant Professor of English and Writing at the University of Tampa. She is a co-editor of "Walt Whitman's Poetry Reprints" and served in the past as Project Manager and Assistant Editor for "Walt Whitman's Annotations." Her dissertation, "'I Never Once Thought of Them': Retail Workers in American Department Store Fiction," investigated representations of labor and gender in American fiction about department stores at the turn of the century.
Stefan Schöberlein is an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Texas A&M University–Central Texas, where he also serves as Program Coordinator for the Master of Science in Liberal Studies. He served as a research assistant for the Whitman Archive from 2013 to 2018 and is currently a contributing editor on the NEH-funded project "Walt Whitman's Journalism: Finding the Poet in the Brooklyn Daily Times." Stefan's research interests lie in the area of nineteenth-century American poetry and its intersections with science and technology. His scholarship related to Whitman has appeared in American Literature, College Literature, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and the Chicago Review. Stefan's edition collection of Whitman's New Orleans writings will be published in spring 2022 by LSU Press (Walt Whitman's New Orleans: Sidewalk Sketches and Newspaper Rambles).
Jason Stacy is Professor of U.S. History and Social Science Pedagogy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is the author of Walt Whitman's Multitudes: Labor Reform and Persona in Whitman's Journalism and the First Leaves of Grass, 1840-1855 (2008), editor of Leaves of Grass, 1860: the 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition (2009), and co-editor of Walt Whitman's Selected Journalism (2015). His articles have appeared in Social Education, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, American Educational History, and the Mickle Street Review. Stacy is a contributing editor of Whitman's journalism for the Walt Whitman Archive.
Paige Wilkinson is a graduate student at the University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science and Center for the Book. She works as an Editorial Assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive and as a Conservation Technician at the UI Library's Conservation and Collections Care department. Her academic interests include special collections librarianship, book studies and conservation, archival research, and digital preservation for open and meaningful access. At the Archive, Paige works on transcription and annotation for the Late Life Correspondence Project.
The Whitman Archive has benefited from the work of a number of previous editors, especially those who worked with general editors Gay Wilson Allen and Sculley Bradley on The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1984; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004). We have drawn particularly heavily on the various volumes of The Correspondence, edited by Edwin Haviland Miller (vols. 1–6) and Ted Genoways (vol. 7), and Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, edited by Edward F. Grier.
Charles B. Green contributed to the Whitman Archive from its inception until 2006. He served as Project Manager from February 1996 until July 2000 when he shifted to the role of Technical Editor for the project. Green is the author of several articles published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review as well as essays in the Walt Whitman Encyclopedia. In 2005 he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at the College of William and Mary, writing a dissertation entitled "Passing into Print: Walt Whitman and His Publishers." He currently serves as Research Associate Professor, School of Pharmacy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.