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Ed Whitley, Professor of English at Lehigh University

Edward Whitley

Professor

Department Chair

610.758.3321
edw204@lehigh.edu
0035 - Drown Hall
Education:

PhD, University of Maryland, College Park, 2004

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Additional Interests

  • Nineteenth-century American literature
  • Walt Whitman
  • Critical Data Studies

Biography

Edward Whitley teaches courses in American literature and digital humanities. He is the author or co-editor of three books on the poet Walt Whitman, including American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet (North Carolina, 2010). He has a new edition of Leaves of Grass forthcoming from W. W. Norton & Co. as part of the Norton Library series of major works in world literature, and with Zachary McLeod Hutchins and Christopher N. Phillips he is preparing the first scholarly edition of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Oxford University Press Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In 2008 he was a co-recipient of a Digital Initiative Start-Up Grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, and from 2015-18 was the director of the Mellon Digital Humanities Initiative at Lehigh University. An award-winning teacher, Professor Whitley is the co-author of the past three editions of Teaching with the Norton Anthology of American Literature: A Guide for Instructors (2012, 2016, and 2022).

Books
Leaves of Grass. Norton Library. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., forthcoming.

Walt Whitman in Context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018 (co-edited with Joanna Levin).

Whitman among the Bohemians. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2014 (co-edited with Joanna Levin).

American Bards: Walt Whitman and Other Unlikely Candidates for National Poet. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010 (paperback, 2014).

 

Textbooks
Teaching with the Norton Anthology of American Literature: A Guide for Instructors. 8th, 9th and 10th editions. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2012, 2016, 2022.

 

Digital Scholarship
The Vault at Pfaff’s: An Archive of Art and Literature by New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Bohemians (pfaffs.web.lehigh.edu). Co-edited with Robert Weidman. 2004 to present. Launched in 2006. Peer reviewed by NINES in 2010. Redesigned in 2014. Currently (2023-24) undergoing a second redesign.

Contributing Editor at The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org), prepared digital editions of Poems by Walt Whitman (1868); Leaves of Grass: The Poems of Walt Whitman (1886); and Gems from Walt Whitman (1889). General Editors Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom. 2002, 2014.

The Crowded Page. Proof of concept funded by an NEH Digital Initiative Start-Up Grant. Co-PI with Andrew Jewell of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. 2008–11. 

 

Selected Articles in Journals and Chapters in Books
“Cultures of Data: Antebellum Literature and the Quantitative Turn.” The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies. Eds. Russ Castronovo and Robert S. Levine. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

"Conservatism: Tradition, Hierarchy, and Fictions of Social Change." The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Politics. Ed. John D. Kerkering. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

“Whitman and Poe’s Literary Networks.” The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman. Eds. Kenneth M. Price and Stefan Schöberlein. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

“Walt Whitman and the New York Literary World.” A Companion to American Literature: 1820-1914, ed. Linck Johnson, 148-63. Vol. 2 of A Companion to American Literature, Ed. Susan Belasco. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020.

Book of Mormon Poetry.” Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, Eds. Jared Hickman and Elizabeth Fenton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 420–37.

“Bluestockings and Bohemians.” The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe, Eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 576–96.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Archives of Injustice.” Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Eds. Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 215–27.

“Networked Literary History and the Bohemians of Antebellum New York.” American Literary History, 29.2 (2017): 286–306.

“The Southern Origins of Bohemian New York: Edward Howland, Ada Clare, and Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe Studies 49 (2016): 35–49 [reprinted in The Bohemian South: Creating Countercultures, from Poe to Punk, Eds. Shawn Chandler Bingham and Lindsey A. Freeman. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. 20-35.]

“Visualizing the Archive.” The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age. Eds. Amy Earhart and Andrew Jewell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 185–208.

“Elizabeth Porter Gould, Author of Leaves of Grass: Gender, Editing, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Marketplace.” ELH 75.2 (2008): 471–96

“The First White Aboriginal: Walt Whitman and John Rollin Ridge.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52.1–2 (2007): 105–39.

“Whitman’s Occasional Nationalism: ‘A Broadway Pageant’ and the Space of Public Poetry.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 60.4 (Fall 2006): 451–80.

“Presenting Walt Whitman: ‘Leaves-Droppings’ as Paratext.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 19.1 (Summer 2001): 1–17.

Teaching

ENGL/FILM 162: How to Watch Movies like a Hollywood Screenwriter
ENGL 377: American Romanticism
ENGL 391: Introduction to Digital Humanities
ENGL 473: Cultures of Data in 19th-century U.S. Literature