Edward Whitley is a Professor and Chairperson of the English Department where he teaches courses in American literature, focusing primarily on the nineteenth century. He has published essays on Walt Whitman and American poetry in such journals as ELH, American Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, ESQ, and The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. His book, American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010. With Joanna Levin he is the co-editor of Whitman among the Bohemians (Iowa, 2014) and Walt Whitman in Context (Cambridge, 2018).
Professor Whitley also works in the field of digital humanities. He has published essays on digitial scholarship in The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age and Archive Journal, has contributed to The Walt Whitman Archive, and, with Robert Weidman, is the co-editor of The Vault at Pfaff's: An Archive of Art and Literature by the Bohemians of Antebellum New York. In 2008, he was, with Andrew Jewell, the recipient of an NEH Digital Initiatives Start-up Grant.
An award-winning teacher, Professor Whitley is the co-author of Teaching with the Norton Anthology of American Literature: A Guide for Instructors (2012 and 2016).