About the Archive

Project and Staff Information

We invite you to send your comments to the Archive staff:

Co-Directors

photograph of Matt Cohen

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.

photograph of Ed Folsom

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).

photograph of Kenneth M. Price

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).

Project Managers and Associate Editors

photograph of Brett Barney

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).

photograph of Stephanie Blalock

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.

photograph of Kevin McMullen

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.

Archive Staff

photograph of Tara Ballard

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.

photograph of Caterina Bernardini

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.

photograph of Karie Cobb

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.

photograph of Samantha Gilmore

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.

photograph of Jeff Hill

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.

photograph of James O'Neil

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.

photograph of Alejandro Omidsalar

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."

photograph of Ashley Palmer

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.

photograph of Stefan Schöberlein

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).

photograph of Jason Stacy

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.

photograph of Paige Wilkinson

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.

Technical Consultants

  • Terry Catapano, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
  • Karin Dalziel, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  • Daniel Pitti, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia
  • Brian Pytlik Zillig, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Contributing Editors

  • Éric Athenot, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Susan Belasco, contributing editor, Whitman's Poems in Periodicals
  • Marina Camboni, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Nicole Gray, contributing editor, Leaves of Grass (1855) Variorum
  • Walter Grünzweig, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Andrew Jewell, contributing editor, Whitman's Blue Book
  • Elizabeth Lorang, contributing editor, Whitman's Poems in Periodicals
  • Matt Miller, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Maria Clara Paro, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Wesley Raabe, contributing editor, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman's Letters
  • Rey Rocha, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Marta Skwara, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Vanessa Steinroetter, contributing editor, Translations of Whitman
  • Edward Whitley, contributing editor, Gems from Walt Whitman and the British editions of Whitman's poetry

Editorial Acknowledgments

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.


Others have also made important contributions to the Archive.

We list Charles Green first because of his key role in the early development of the Archive. Other past staff members follow in alphabetical order:

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.

  • Roger Asselineau (a founding member of the Advisory Board who served until his death) 1997-2002
  • Ty Alyea (transcription and encoding of Whitman's marginalia) 2013-2015
  • Alex Ashland (transcription and encoding of correspondence; editing of the updated image gallery; development of correspondence mapping project; work on the Whitman Encyclopedia and journalism) 2014-2021
  • Amanda Axley (transcription and encoding of correspondence)
  • Zach Bajaber (web design and programming) 2004-2008
  • Kyle Barton (transcribing, encoding, annotating, and managing correspondence; contributed to image gallery; maintained and updated Whitman bibliography) 2012-2015
  • Kassie Baron (transcription and encoding of Late Life correspondence and the correspondence of Walt Whitman and Hannah Whitman) 2022
  • Noelle Bates (transcription and encoding of correspondence)
  • Micah Bateman (transcription and encoding of Whitman's marginalia and annotations) 2016-2017
  • Stacey Berry (transcription and encoding; EAD creation and maintenance; handwriting tool) 2004-2010
  • Matthew Blackwell (photography section) 2013-2014
  • Robbie Bingler (programming; database management) 2000
  • Mary Bolin (creation of MODS records) 2005
  • Alicia Bones (encoding post-Reconstruction correspondence) 2012-2013
  • Jennifer Borgerding (transcription; proofreading) 2000-2001
  • Stephen Boykewich (scanning of manuscripts; proofreading; encoding) 2002-2004
  • Blake Bronson-Bartlett (transcribing, encoding, and annotating correspondence and notebooks; contributed to "Poets to Come" translations) 2007-2008; 2011-2014; 2017-2019
  • Travis Brown (contributed to editing of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden) 2008-2010
  • Joelle Byars (Whitman's Reading Handlist; marginalia) 2019
  • Sandy Byrd (encoding of prose texts) 2006-2008
  • Michael Carmody (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003-2004
  • Janel Cayer (transcription and encoding; image processing; website and database maintenance; staff training) 2002-2004; 2008-2015
  • Regan Chasek (image processing; transcription and encoding of correspondence, journalism, and Whitman's geography scrapbook) 2017-2019
  • Jonathan Cheng (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2014-2015
  • Kirsten Clawson (transcription and encoding of post-Reconstruction correspondence, notebooks, and prose manuscripts) 2013-2015
  • Nicole Cloeren (scanning; transcription) 1999
  • Eric Conrad (transcribing, encoding, and annotating correspondence; expanded bibliography and contemporary reviews; introduction for Leaves of Grass Imprints) 2006-2007; 2009-2013
  • Katharine DeLamater (updating tracking database records and data entry for Whitman's Old Age Correspondence) 2020
  • Jean Dickinson (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2000-2002
  • Todd Diehl (revision; updating of bibliography) 1999-2001
  • Stephen Disrud (proofreading and correction of texts) 2006
  • David Donlon (transcription) 1995
  • Mary Ellen Ducey (creation of EAD finding aid for poetry manuscripts) 2002-2005
  • Sara Duke (image processing, transcription, and encoding) 2015-2017
  • Allison Dushane (transcription, encoding, and proofing of With Walt Whitman in Camden) 2003-2006
  • Gertrud Elisberg (transcription, encoding, and annotating of Whitman's journalism) 2013-2014
  • Marie Ernster (transcription and encoding of contemporary reviews and correspondence)
  • Ian Faith (transcription, encoding, and/or proofing of post-Reconstruction and Old Age correspondence and With Walt Whitman in Camden) 2015-2017; 2019
  • Said Fallaha (proofing of encyclopedia entries and editing of Two Rivulets) 2016-2017
  • Adoni Faxas (image processing; image transfer and archiving work) 2013-2014
  • Erica Fretwell (encoding and project management for manuscript annotation interface development) 2006-2008
  • Ryan Furlong (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2015-2021
  • Amanda Gailey (database and image management; transcription; training) 2002-2006
  • Emily Gengler (data entry for correspondence mapping project) 2016-2017
  • Cindy Girard (programming; development of search engine) 2003
  • Matthew Gold (Unix editing; formulation of teaching unit questions) 1997
  • Nicole Gray (project management; stylesheet development; co-editing of Whitman's fiction and editing of 1855 variorum; staff training; website and database maintenance) 2010-2012; 2014-2020
  • Lauren Grewe (transcription and encoding of Whitman's marginalia; project management at UT-Austin) 2012-2014
  • Ramon Guerra (transcription of poems in periodicals) 2003-2004
  • Melody Han (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003-2004
  • Kirk Hastings (creation of stylesheets and customization of document type definition) 2001-2002
  • John Havard (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2005
  • Whitney Helms (transcription and encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2006-2007
  • Caitlin Henry (transcription and encoding of journalism, marginalia, and 1855 Variorum material; master of the geography scrapbook file) 2017-2019
  • Peter Henry (project manager; encoding of poetry manuscripts; EAD encoding) 2002-2003
  • Amy Hezel (transcriber and encoder of poetry manuscripts) 2004-2005
  • Chris Higgs (transcription of texts, XML encoding of various documents) 2005
  • Breanna Himschoot (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2018–2021
  • Luke Hollis (transcription and encoding; image processing) 2009-2010
  • Chaya Huber (contributed to the Yiddish translation of Leaves of Grass) 2012-2013
  • Christy Hyman (transcribed, encoded, and proofed Whitman's marginalia and annotations) 2019
  • Leslie Ianno (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003-2004
  • Tim Jackson, (assistant editor of Civil War prose) 2009-2011
  • Patrick Jagoda (transcription, encoding, and proofing of With Walt Whitman in Camden) 2003-2006
  • Michael Jamieson (encoding of criticism) 2008-2009
  • Eder Jaramillo (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2011-2014
  • Chris Jessee (digital imaging consulting) 2002-2005
  • Andrew Jewell (preparation of EAD files; xslt; manuscript transcription and encoding) 2001-2012
  • Nima Najafi Kianfar (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2010-2014
  • Andrew David King (transcribing, encoding, and editing Whitman's Old Age Correspondence) 2019-2020
  • Zachary King (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2010-2011
  • Gabrielle Kirilloff (image processing, database entry, XSLT work) 2013-2014
  • Alex Kinnaman (transcription, encoding, and annotating of correspondence) 2014-2015
  • Sera Kong (transcription and encoding of Whitman's marginalia and annotations) 2016-2017
  • Nick Krauter (encoding of prose texts) 2006-2008
  • Brady Krien (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2017
  • Kathryn Kruger (transcription, encoding, and annotating of correspondence; edited poetry manuscript finding aids; Civil War Washington) 2007-2008; 2009-2010; 2011-2013
  • Khadizatul Kubra (transcription and encoding of journalism and review; expansion of the Archive's catalog of Whitman translations) 2021-2023
  • Robert LaCosse (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2004
  • April Lambert (encoding of Whitman family correspondence) 2006-2007
  • Ashley Lawson (transcription and encoding of prose manuscripts, XSLT work) 2009-2012
  • Courtney Lawton (transcription and encoding of scribal documents and post-Reconstruction correspondence; image processing) 2013
  • Farrah Lehman (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2006-2007
  • Kirby Little (transcription and encoding of correspondence, XSLT work) 2016-2017
  • Margaret Loose (revision of bibliography; transcription of poetry) 1999
  • Elizabeth Lorang (project and program management; XSLT development; co-editing of poems in periodicals; staff training; infrastructure development and maintenance) 2004-2016
  • Thomas Lukas (SGML consulting) 1996
  • Megan Maher (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003
  • Kathleen Marcum (data entry and maintenance of tracking database records) 2018
  • Caitlin Matheis (creation of database of Whitman's appearance in films; enhancement of the site's biography of Whitman) 2020-2021
  • Josh Matthews (transcription and encoding of notebooks) 2005-2008
  • Elizabeth McClurg (processing digital scans and data entry) 2009-2011
  • Jason McCormick (image processing) 2020-2021
  • Jason McIntosh (database development for the gallery; encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2001-2002
  • Alicia Meyer (transcription and encoding of post-Reconstruction correspondence; image processing) 2013
  • Jon Miller (coordination of revision and updating of bibliography; encoding of bibliography) 1999-2000
  • Shea Montgomery (preparation of interviews for publication) 2012-2013
  • Vince Moran (image processing; transcription and encoding of journalism and correspondence) 2012-2013
  • Elva Moreno Del Rio (transcription and encoding of journalism; expansion of the Archive's catalog of Whitman translations; expansion of the Disciples section) 2020-2022
  • Heather Morton (assistant project manager) 2003-2005
  • Joel Myerson (a founding member of the Advisory Board who served until his death) 1997-2021
  • Rob Nelson (project assistant and then project manager; site design; database development) 1997-2000
  • Natalie O'Neal (transcription and encoding of post-Reconstruction correspondence and notebooks) 2014-2015
  • Alyssa Olson (Civil War Washington; editing photo metadata) 2007-2009
  • Jennifer Overkamp (transcription and encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2002-2003
  • Juana Paramo (image processing, file transfer) 2014-2015
  • Megan Peabody (photo processing) 2007
  • Heather Peltier (encoding) 1997-1998
  • Heidi Peters (transcription of reviews; checking of Rhys edition of Leaves; encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2005
  • Ashley Price (transcription of poetry manuscripts; updating of database) 2003-2005
  • Gillian Price (transcription of poetry manuscripts; proofreading and encoding of Vasseur's translation of Whitman) 2006
  • Rachel Price (preparation of Vasseur edition) 2006-2007
  • Joshua Ranger (EAD encoding and encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003
  • Beverley Rilett (processing digital images; and transcribing, encoding, and annotating correspondence) 2008-2012
  • Lisa Renfro (grant writing; editing and blessing of poetry manuscripts) 2004-2007
  • Katrina Robertson (transcription and encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2001-2002
  • Susan J. Rosowski (a member of the Advisory Board who served until her death) 2001-2004
  • Alice Rutkowski (project manager; helped with the development of the Whitman DTD and the encoding guidelines) 2000-2002
  • Zainab Saleh (image processing; transcription and encoding of correspondence; Whitman's marginalia) 2019-2020
  • Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant (transcription and encoding of Whitman's Blue Book) 2008-2011
  • David Seaman (conversion of texts from Borland database format into TEI Lite and SGML/XML consulting) 1998-2001
  • Amy L. Scherdin (encoding) 1998-1999
  • Benjamin Schmidt (transcription and encoding of correspondence; correspondence data visualization) 2016-2018
  • Jeannette Schollaert (image processing; transcription and encoding of prose manuscripts and correspondence) 2015-2016
  • John Schwaninger (image processing; transcribing and encoding, correspondence and scribal documents) 2010-2013
  • David Sheesley (development of scripts for file conversion; database development) 2002-2003
  • Nina Shevchuk-Murray (preparation of Ukranian and Russian editions) 2007-2008
  • Tracy Simmons (transcription of interviews; image processing) 2005-2006
  • Melissa Sinner (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2000-2003
  • Jonathan Soma (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003
  • Justin St. Clair (transcription of poetry manuscripts) 2000-2001
  • Vanessa Steinroetter (transcription and encoding of correspondence and reviews) 2007-2011
  • Ashlyn Stewart (image processing for correspondence; co-editor of Whitman's cultural geography scrapbook; transcription and encoding of journalism; key contributor to the Archive's infrastructural overhaul; staff training; party and event planning; waffle making) 2018-2023
  • Nicholas Swiercek (transcription and encoding of interviews) 2005-2007
  • Sarah Synovec (transcription and encoding; image processing) 2008-2010
  • Elliot Tally (scanning of various editions of Leaves) 1997-1998
  • Grace Thomas (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2012-2013
  • John Unsworth (general consulting) 1995
  • Sarah Walker (annotating Whitman's Civil War-era journalism) 2010-2011
  • Katherine L. Walter (co-principal investigator of two Whitman-related research projects funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services: A Virtual Archive of Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts and Interoperability of Metadata for Thematic Research Collections: A Model Based on the Walt Whitman Archive) 2002-2007
  • Joshua Ware (database development, transcription and encoding) 2008-2011
  • Bart Welling (EAD encoding) 2002-2003
  • Sarah Weinert (photo processing) 2007
  • Kara Wentworth (transcription and encoding of correspondence) 2017
  • Frank Wheeler (encoding of criticism) 2008-2009
  • Jessica Williams (encoding of prose texts) 2007
  • Leslee Wright (transcription of poetry manuscripts; resizing of images) 2003
  • Zane Zimbelman (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003

Advisory Board

  • Edward L. Ayers is university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond as well as former Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. He has received the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his scholarship, been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, and is former president of the Organization of American Historians. He is executive director of New American History, dedicated to making the nation's history more visible and useful for a broad range of audiences.
  • Micah Bateman is an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he received the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award in 2013 and co-authored Mapping the Imaginary: Supporting Creative Writers through Programming, Prompts, and Research (2019), a guide for librarians. His public humanities research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa.
  • Barbara Bair is a historian and curator of Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, where she oversees the manuscript collections associated with Walt Whitman. Coordinator of the Library's 2019 celebration of the Whitman Bicentennial, advisor on documentary films, and co-curator of exhibits on Whitman, she was a member of the planning committee that devised the By the People crowdsourcing transcription project at the Library, for which the Walt Whitman Campaign was the first project, and is the specialist for digital humanities presentations of manuscript collections, including three Walt Whitman sites. She is the recipient, with other editors, of the Lyman Butterfield Award of the Association for Documentary Editing and has served as an advisor to documentary editing projects for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
  • Eric Conrad is the Prep School Assistant Director at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School in New York City where he also teaches courses on nineteenth-century American literature, memoir, and contemporary fiction. His various publications have examined aspects of Whitman's relationship to the emergence of modern literary promotion in the United States. He is a former managing editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (2010-2012) and has worked on several projects for the Walt Whitman Archive (2006-2007; 2009-2013), including the transcription and encoding of Whitman's correspondence and notebooks and an introduction to Leaves of Grass Imprints.
  • Wai Chee Dimock has published widely on American literature and is best known for her work on Melville, Whitman, and Thoreau, and Native authors such as Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Joy Harjo. Her public-facing essays have appeared in Artforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, New Yorker, and New York Times. She taught at Yale for many years, and is now a researcher at Harvard's Center for the Environment, working on a new book on public health, climate change, and indigenous communities. Her Weak Planet (Chicago UP) was published in 2020.
  • Julia Flanders is a professor of the practice in English and the director of the Digital Scholarship Group in the Northeastern University Library. She also directs the Women Writers Project and serves as editor in chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly. She has served as chair of the TEI Consortium and as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. She is the co-editor, with Neil Fraistat, of The Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship, and the co-editor, with Fotis Jannidis, of The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Resources (Routledge, 2019).
  • Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor Emeritus of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. A specialist in the social and cultural history of New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he has focused on the town of Concord, Massachusetts, to explore broad issues in the American past. His first book, The Minutemen and Their World (1976; 25th anniversary edition, 2001) received the Bancroft Prize in 1977. It will appear in a revised edition from Picador press in 2022. The Transcendentalists and Their World was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2021 and was designated one of the "ten best books of 2021" by the Wall Street Journal. From 1988 to 1998 Gross directed the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary, the formative years of the Walt Whitman Archive.
  • Walter Grünzweig teaches American Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund University. Austrian by birth, he received his PhD at Graz University. His book Constructing the German Walt Whitman was published by the University of Iowa Press. He has wrote some twenty-five articles on Whitman, mostly stressing international contexts. The first German translation of Whitman's 1855 Leaves, a collective project with seventy graduate students conducted by him at Dortmund, will be published in 2022. He was guest professor or instructor at universities in Maribor, Dakar, Leipzig, Berlin (Humboldt), Trieste, Iowa City, Rome, and Izmir. In 2010, he was awarded the German Ars Legendi Prize for Excellence in University Teaching.
  • Jerome McGann has been a major voice in at least four areas of literary studies: literature of the Romantic era, the "New Historicism" in literary criticism, revisionary theory and practice of textual editing, and the digital humanities. At the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH), he created the Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archive, the Ivanhoe project, and  NINES (Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship), a project which is building an institutional structure of peer-reviewed online scholarship in the humanities. His recent books include A New Republic of Letters (Harvard, 2014) and an edition of Blake; or The Huts of America (Harvard, 2017).
  • Daniel Pitti is the Director of the Social Networks and Archival Context Cooperative (SNAC), University of Virginia Library; and chair of the International Council on Archives Expert Group on Archival Description (ICA EGAD). From 1997 until 2017, Pitt served as the Associate Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). He is the principal architect of two international archival description standards, Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). Pitti is leading the development of the Records in Contexts (RiC) standard that aspires to be the foundation of next-generation archival description and access. Prior to 1997, Pitti served as the Librarian for Advanced Technology Projects at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author or editor of 16 books, including Walt Whitman's America (winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award), Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times (winner of the Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Book Prize), and Beneath the American Renaissance (Winner of the Christian Gauss Award). He is a regular reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Review of Books. He is the editor of A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman and Whitman's Leaves of Grass: The 150th Anniversary Edition.
  • Martha Nell Smith is Professor of English and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. Her numerous print publications include three award- winning books—Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Dickinson, coauthored with Ellen Louise Hart (Paris Press 1998), Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, coauthored with Cristanne Miller and Suzanne Juhasz (Texas 1993), Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (Texas 1992). Smith is also Coordinator and Executive Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives projects at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia.
  • Darius Stewart is a Lulu "Merle" Johnson Fellow and Ph.D. student in English, specializing in Nonfiction Studies, African American Literature and Culture, and Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. His primary research interests interrogate black masculinities within black gay material culture, especially representations of "DL" identity in film and television, digital and social media, and adult blogging platforms and marketplaces. Darius' recent writing considers the "Calamus" poems and their celebration of the "manly love of comrades" within the context of HIV/AIDS. He lives in Iowa City with his dog, Fry.
  • John Unsworth was appointed Dean of Libraries, University Librarian, and Professor of English at the University of Virginia in 2016. From 2012 to 2016, John was Vice-Provost for Library and Technology Services and Chief Information Officer at Brandeis University. From 2003 to 2012, he was Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he also was faculty in the department of English and the Library. From 1993-2003, he was Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and a faculty member in the English Department at the University of Virginia. His first faculty appointment was in English, at North Carolina State University, from 1989 to 1993.

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