About

Project Staff

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

Co-Directors

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 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).

Project Managers and Associate Editors

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 an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science 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 Writings.

Kevin McMullen, project manager and associate editor, is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has served as the Archive's project manager since 2018, overseeing and coordinating work on all projects and grants administered at UNL. He served as lead writer on the Archive's recent NEH grant to identify and digitize Whitman's anonymously authored journalism for the Brooklyn Daily Times. His work has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman (2024), Textual Cultures, The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, amongst other venues. He is the co-creator and editor of Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger, an online digital edition of the newspaper writings of Fanny Fern. He also serves as the project manager of the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive.

Archive Staff

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 was involved in the planning of the 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.

Francesca Boston is a history major at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She has worked with the Walt Witman Archive since Spring 2023, under Dr. Jason Stacy. She took a semester off to study abroad in Bulgaria before jumping right back into work on Witman's newspaper editorials. She has primarily focused on Witman's writings about the Brooklyn waterworks in the Brooklyn Daily Times and has recently started research on editorials focused on "model artists" in the New Orleans Cresent. Her favorite part about working on the Archive has been bringing forgotten people or places back to modern memory through research and annotations.

Karie Cobb, research assistant, is an M.A. student specializing in Literary and Cultural Studies and pursuing certification in the Teaching of Writing. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland Global Campus. Her research is primarily focused on 19th century literature, particularly the Civil War, and its impact and implications on American society in the 21st century. She is currently a graduate research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive working on a project to identify and digitize Whitman's unsigned editorials for the New Orleans Daily Crescent from the late 1840s.

Sophia Craig is an English Ph.D. candidate and M.A. Library & Information Science student at the University of Iowa. She is currently the Managing Editor for the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and Editorial Assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive. Her research includes 19th/20th century American novels, short stories, and poems, and she is interested in the impact psychoanalysis and gender studies have on domesticity, society, and the individual. Previously, Sophia earned her B.A. in English literature and creative writing at Purdue University. At the Archive, Sophia updates and maintains the online bibliography of Whitman criticism.

Jamie DeRousse is an undergraduate student at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He is pursuing a major in history with minors in geography and political science. His research interests include pre-Civil War U.S. history and urban geography. Jamie has worked for the Walt Whitman Archive as a research assistant since August of 2023. He has worked on annotations for Whitman's editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Times, and is currently working on a project to transcribe, encode, and annotate Whitman's work for the New Orleans Crescent.

Kenneth Michael Hoover is a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the field of Literary and Cultural Studies. He received a BA from the University of Iowa and an MA from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where he taught first-year writing. Before teaching, he worked various jobs including as a film projectionist, as a pizza delivery driver, and as a bookseller for Strand Book Store in New York. He is currently working as a research assistant in the Walt Whitman Archive and maintains a personal web presence at www.kennethmichael.org.

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.

Stefan Schöberlein is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University–Central Texas and a Contributing Editor for the Whitman Archive, where he focuses mostly on Whitman's journalism. Stefan is the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman (2024), the author of Writing the Brain: Material Minds and Literature, 1800–1880 (Oxford, 2023), and the co-author of the forthcoming Crescent City Sojourn: Walt Whitman in New Orleans, 1848 (Iowa, forthcoming 2025).

Cassandra Simms holds a B.A. from Texas A&M University–Central Texas, where she is currently pursuing her M.A in English with a focus on composition and rhetoric. Formerly a writing tutor for the university's Writing Center, she has been a Graduate Research Assistant for the Whitman Archive since 2023, working on digitizing Whitman's journalism for the Brooklyn Daily Times. She is co-author on a forthcoming chapter in Students in the Archives (Illinois, forthcoming 2025).

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 on Walt Whitman have appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, the Mickle Street Review, and Technology & Culture (with Stephanie Blalock, Kevin McMullen, and Stefan Schöberlein). Stacy is a contributing editor of Whitman's journalism for the Walt Whitman Archive.

Zachary Turpin is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the University of Idaho, specializing in the archival recovery the lost writings of American authors like Walt Whitman and Charles W. Chesnutt. He is co-editor, with Matt Miller, of Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments (2020), as well as of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism: Volume III, 1848-1855 (forthcoming 2025) with Douglas Noverr, Jason Stacy, and Stefan Schöberlein. His writings have appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, J19, ESQ, Legacy, and elsewhere. Turpin is a former Kluge Fellow at the US Library of Congress, and a former Peterson Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. He is currently a contributing editor of Whitman's journalism and fiction for the Walt Whitman Archive.

Emma Whaley is pursuing an M.A. in English, with a focus in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2024. Her research interests include classics and religion, philosophy, queer studies, poetry, and drama. At the Archive, she works on image cataloging, transcription, and encoding for the Late Life Writings project.

Development Team

Erin Chambers is a front end developer in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Erin earned her Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from UNL, a B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and is working on an M.A. in English with an emphasis in literary and critical theory, especially queer theory. She has contributed to a number of digital humanities projects, including the African Poetry Digital Portal, the Open ONI Online Newspapers Initiative, Petitioning for Freedom, and the Walt Whitman Archive.

Karin Dalziel, digital development manager and designer in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL, received a B.F.A. in Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 and an M.A. in Library Science from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 2010. Dalziel has created interface designs and search features for many digital humanities research sites, including sites such as NEH-funded projects Civil War Washington (http://www.civilwardc.org) and the William F. Cody Archive (http://www.codyarchive.org).

Will Dewey is a developer at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities since 2021. He has also worked on Petitioning for Freedom and modernizing the Walt Whitman Archive. He received a BA in religious studies and political science from Emory University in 2008, a Master of Theological Studies (focusing on Buddhism) from Harvard Divinity School in 2010, and a PhD in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2017, as well as a certificate in software engineering from Flatiron School in 2020. His prior experience with digital projects includes creating web and gallery content for the Rubin Museum of Art and improving the metadata of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. He continues to publish articles in the field of Tibetan Buddhist Studies.

Brian Pytlik Zillig is Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Brian has been involved in digital humanities for more than a decade, working on numerous projects, including the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online and the Walt Whitman Archive, and many others. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Greg Tunink is a developer in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) and community manager for the Open Online Newspaper Initiative (Open ONI). He has helped create and support open source research tools such as Annotonia and sites including The Willa Cather Archive, Nebraska Newspapers, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Nebraska Authors, and the Salmon Pueblo Archeological Research Collection. He has overseen numerous server migrations and streamlined server software deployment, configuration, and administration. Greg received his Bachelor's in Computer Science with minors in Mathematics and Business from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 2009.

Technical Consultants

Terry Catapano, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Pitti, Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia

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.

Past Project Staff

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
Lucas Bernal (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2019
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
Gabrielle Engstrom (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2017
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
Hannah Fink (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2020
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
Samantha Gilmore (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism; transcription and encoding of Whitman's Late Life manuscripts) 2019-2024
Cindy Girard (programming; development of search engine) 2003
Samuel Goggin (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2018
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
Olivia Haddox (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2018
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
Jeff Hill (microfilm scanning; image processing of correspondence; transcription and encoding of journalism; transcription and encoding of Late Life manuscripts) 2021-2024
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
Amy Kapp (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2021-2022
Amanda Kapper (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2016
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
Cassandra Lampitt (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2019
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
Conner Lynn (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2022-2023
Megan Maher (encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2003
Kathleen Marcum (data entry and maintenance of tracking database records) 2018
Thad Marshall (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2016
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
Cayden Miller (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2018
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 (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
Alejandro Omidsalar (co-editor of "Walt Whitman's Poetry Reprints," project manager and assistant editor for "Walt Whitman's Annotations") 2016-2024
Jennifer Overkamp (transcription and encoding of poetry manuscripts) 2002-2003
Ashley Palmer (co-editor of "Walt Whitman's Poetry Reprints," project manager and assistant editor for "Walt Whitman's Annotations") 2016-2024
Juana Paramo (image processing, file transfer) 2014-2015
Andrew Pashea (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2016
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
Lucas Reincke (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2016
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
Nolan Shan (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2016
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
Taylor Sloan (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2021
Nicole Snyder (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2017
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
Ashley Webb (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2021
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
Paige Wilkinson (work on correspondence and the Whitman bibliography) 2022-2024
Jessica Williams (encoding of prose texts) 2007
Leslee Wright (transcription of poetry manuscripts; resizing of images) 2003
Tyler Young (transcription, encoding, and annotation of journalism) 2018
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.