WASHINGTON, PA (March 3, 2016) - Washington & Jefferson College’s (W&J) Branton Lecture Series resumes March 7 with "The Bohemians of Antebellum New York and the Networks of American Literary History," a lecture by Edward Whitley, associate professor of English at Lehigh University.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held in the Media Room of The Commons on the W&J campus at 7 p.m.
“We were looking for an Americanist to speak this year, and his lecture is a good tie-in to several of our current classes here,” said Dana Shiller, Ph.D., chair of the English Department at W&J. “Dr. [Carolyn] Kyler is teaching a class on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and Dr. [Linda] Troost taught a digital humanities class in the fall. His visit to campus will fill a niche in a lot of ways.”
Whitley, who teaches courses in American literature, has published essays on Walt Whitman and American poetry in ELH, 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. Whitman among the Bohemians, a collection of essays that he co-edited with Joanna Levin, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2014.
He also works in the field of digital humanities and has published essays on digital scholarship in The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age and Archive Journal.
Professor Whitley also works in the field of the digital humanities. He 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).
Named for Clarence Branton, a former chairman of W&J’s English Department, and endowed by the Branton family, the Branton Lecture Series seeks to bring a literary scholar to campus each year to offer a unique perspective on literature to W&J students and to the community at large.
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