2023-24 Projects and Project Staff

The main projects this coming year will be completing the transformation of the Whitman Archive’s technical infrastructure under the power of an NEH grant; finishing work on another NEH grant to expand the Archive’s section on Whitman’s journalism; starting a new NEH grant to complete the Archive’s selection of Whitman’s late-life materials; working on some new grant proposals for Chesnutt materials and collaborations in Cleveland; submitting the final manuscript and building the Manifold site for The Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing (based on our successful symposium on the same theme); and working on an NHPRC-funded initiative to create Cleveland-area collaborations and add 250 pieces of correspondence to the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive.

This year’s UNL Whitman staff:

• Dr. Caterina Bernardini, Contributing Editor; Lecturer in English
• Tara Ballard, Assistant Editor; PhD candidate, English
• Karie Cobb, Assistant Editor; MA candidate, English
• Lauren Millhorn, Assistant Editor; MA candidate, English
• Jeff Hill, Assistant Editor
• Karin Dalziel, Developer and Designer, CDRH
• Dr. Kevin McMullen, Senior Associate Editor; Research Assistant Professor of English
• Greg Tunink, Developer, CDRH
• Dr. William Dewey, Developer, CDRH
• Dr. Brett Barney, Senior Associate Editor; Research Associate Professor, Libraries

This year’s staff for the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive:

• Karin Dalziel, Developer and Designer, CDRH
• Samantha Gilmore, Assistant Editor; PhD Candidate, English
• Dr. Christy Hyman, Social Media Coordinator; Assistant Professor of Human Geography, Mississippi State University and Postdoctoral Researcher, Cornell University
• Dr. Kevin McMullen, Senior Associate Editor; Research Assistant Professor of English
• Bianca Swift, Assistant Editor and Social Media Coordinator; MA candidate, English
• Chaun Ballard, Assistant Editor; PhD candidate, English
• Dr. Antje Anderson, Assistant Editor
• Greg Tunink, Developer, CDRH
• Laura Weakley, Metadata Encoding Specialist, CDRH

We hope soon to announce student interns for Chesnutt from the Cleveland area, too.

The Chesnutt Archive is directed by Stephanie Browner, Kenneth M. Price, and Matt Cohen; the Whitman Archive is directed by Cohen, Price, and Ed Folsom.

Chesnutt’s Cleveland Correspondence funded by NHPRC

We’re delighted to announce that the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive has been awarded a one-year grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to expand its digital edition of Chesnutt’s correspondence with a focus on his life in Cleveland.

The work began in August 2023, and will involve two main sets of activities. Our usual digitization work is one: obtaining digital images, transcriptions, and encodings of Chesnutt’s correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, and writing annotations to help readers get a sense of the context for these letters. The second branch is building relationships in the Cleveland area with individuals, groups, and institutions that have an interest in Cleveland, with an eye to shaping the edition, its priorities and activities in a way that supports people there today.

We’re in conversation right now with folks at the Western Reserve Historical Society (which holds much of the material we’ll be digitizing) and its African American Archives Auxiliary; Lorain County Community College; the Cleveland Public Library; and Case Western Reserve University.

Inspiring New DH Work

Two UNL English graduate students–advisees of mine–were chosen as CDRH Summer Fellows this year: Sam Gilmore (PhD) and Hanna Varilek (MA). Read all about Hanna’s project here, in a story which also gives a sense of what the summer fellowship is all about. It’s a great program, and props to Carrie Heitman (Anthro faculty and AD of the CDRH) for making it happen.

I’ll update this post with the URLs of Sam and Hanna’s projects soon.

A Trenchant Reflection on the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive

The poet, UNL English MA candidate, and Chesnutt Archive GRA Bianca Swift has published a thought piece on Charles Chesnutt, the archive, and editorial work in the journal Scholarly Editing. Take a look!

Swift will also be presenting on her thinking at the ADE conference in Washington, DC in June, so go and listen and chat if you can!

A New Book: The Silence of the Miskito Prince

I’m delighted to announce that my book The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized is available from the University of Minnesota Press!

How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite open conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Focusing on the first two centuries of North American colonization, and taking its title from an emblematic eighteenth-century interaction between Olaudah Equiano and Prince George of the Miskito Tribe, this book explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience.

The cover: with many thanks to the entire production crew at the University of Minnesota Press, who did a magnificent job from start to finish of envisioning and making this book.

Summer of Podcasts II: C19 and Whitman’s Journalism

WALT WHITMAN IS BEST KNOWN today as a poet, but he produced journalism of one sort or another for almost his whole working life. In the fast-evolving, competitive world of New York area newspapers, Whitman was a well-known figure. But identifying the pieces he wrote during his most active years in the business–even sorting out which papers he worked for and when–has proven a difficult task for generations of Whitman scholars.

A new glimpse into that world, providing some revelations not just about Whitman but about the practice of journalism during his time, has emerged from the recent work by a team of scholars at the Walt Whitman Archive. On this podcast, hosted by the nineteenth-century American studies association known as C19, I interview Drs. Stephanie M. Blalock, Kevin McMullen, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jason Stacy to get a preview of their discoveries. They put together a great podcast: all I had to do was ask questions and utter expressions of awe at the results of their work–which I suspect is just a fraction of what we’re likely to learn from them in the future.

Summer of Podcasts I: Hannah Alpert-Abrams

http://hightheory.net/

Some Whitman Essays of Interest

Happy New Year from Cohenlab!

The textual scholarship journal Textual Cultures has been generous to Whitman studies lately.

Of interest in the latest issue are, first, a review by Matt Cohen of Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller’s edition of Whitman manuscripts Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments (Textual Cultures 14.2 [2021]: 254–58).

Second, there’s an account by Cohen and Nicole Gray of the development and theoretical significance of the Whitman Archive‘s award-winning 1855 Leaves of Grass Variorum, titled “Printers of the Kosmos: Modeling Variation in the 1855 Leaves of Grass” (Textual Cultures 14.2 [2021]: 134–54).

Review Essay Published!

Samantha Gilmore and Matt Cohen recently published a review essay titled “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?” in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 61.4 (Winter 2020): 525-531. (Yes, 2020–but what is time, really?)

The essay assesses Ezra Tawil’s ambitious 2018 book, Literature, American Style: The Originality of Imitation in the Early Republic.

Chesnutt Archive Renovated!

The new version of the (newly retitled) Charles W. Chesnutt Archive is live!

See: the beautiful artwork of Kat Wiese.

Witness: the elegant interface design of Karin Dalziel.

Enjoy: the expanded resources, from reviews and short stories to novels and galley proofs, edited by our amazing cadre of transcriber/encoders.

We look forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts about the Chesnutt Archive! Thanks to the NEH for its support in this endeavor.

Summer Events

This summer I’ll be speaking at several conferences, as will many of the folks working on the Chesnutt and Whitman archives.

Samantha Gilmore, Ashlyn Stewart, Karin Dalziel, and all of both archives’ senior editorial staff will be presenting at the American Literature Association annual meeting.

Many of those same folks, plus Bianca Swift and former Whitman Archive project manager Nicole Gray will be speaking at the all-virtual Society for Textual Scholarship meeting. That one will be free to the public to register for and attend.

I’ll be giving a keynote panel presentation at the American Antiquarian Society’s virtual conference “Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions: A Conference on the Bicentennial of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy.” The panel, “Textual Editing and the Future of Digital Editions,” is on May 26th, and features three brilliant scholars, Robert Warrior, Christine De Lucia, and Jimmy Sweet.