Faculty Spotlight - February 7, 2024
College of Arts & Sciences: Faculty Spotlight Series
Dr. Stefan Schöberlein
Department: Humanities, Assistant Professor of English
Presentation: Thursday, February 7, 2024, 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Talk by Dr. Stefan Schöberlein.
Location: Founders Hall, Bernie Beck Lecture Hall (Doors open at 4:15 p.m.)
All are welcome to attend. Appetizers and light refreshments will be served!
“Missing me one place, search another”: Walt Whitman
beyond Leaves of Grass
Dr. Schöberlein’s talk will examine unfamiliar sides of the well-known poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), showcasing newly discovered writings, on-going archival preservations efforts, and collaborative, student-led research that emerged
from it.
Abstract:
When readers think of Walt Whitman, they often picture his white beard and long, somewhat chaotic lines of poetry. Yet while many readers today tend to understand the author of Leaves of Grass as primarily a single-book poet, Whitman scholarship has increasingly embraced his “other” writings: Whitman’s scrapbooks, assorted fiction, and newspaper writings. Dr. Schöberlein’s talk will introduce these “emerging Whitmans” with a particular focus on Whitman as a journalist. Tall, fashionable, and dandy-like, Walt the journalist embodied the counter-cultural aspects of preprofessional newspaper work in the antebellum United States. Walt did not just report, but he made the news: he politicized, polemicized, and puffed, painted colorful scenes and portraits of urban life, and—on more than one occasion—scandalized moralists and other do-gooders. Dr. Schöberlein’s talk will detail ongoing efforts to discover and trace “new Whitmans,” showcase digital research produced by his students, and reveal newly identified prose that will soon be published on the Walt Whitman Archive.
Thirty-one essays by established and emerging Whitman scholars, outlining new directions in Whitman studies, introducing new textual discoveries, and charting novel theoretical approaches to Whitman’s work within and without Leaves of Grass...
The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman
Edited by Kenneth M. Price and
Stefan Schöberlein,
Oxford University Press,
February 2024 (668 pages)
More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel,
Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.
Dr. Stefan Schöberlein is an Assistant Professor of English, with a focus on the anglophone literature of the long nineteenth-century. He is the editor of Walt Whitman’s New Orleans (LSU, 2022), the author of Writing the Brain (Oxford, 2023), and a contributing editor of the Walt Whitman Archive. He has also published literary translations into German. His forthcoming work includes co-authored books on Walt Whitman in Louisiana (Iowa Press, c. 2025) and Walt Whitman in the late 1850s (Edinburgh UP, c. 2026), as well as research relating to a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2024-2026).