International Whitman Week

Please download the attachment at the bottom of the page to find the programme of events and locations

Incoming Faculty:

Ed Folsom: Roy J. Carver Professor of English at the University of Iowa; co-director of the online Whitman Archive; editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review; author, co-author and editor of over 20 Whitman-related books, including, most recently, Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas: A Facsimile of the Original Edition (2010), Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (2007) co-authored with Kenneth M. Price, Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman (2005).

Jay Grossman: Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University; author of Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (2003), and numerous essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literature and culture, especially Emerson and Whitman, the history of the book, and the history of sexuality; co-editor (with Betsy Erkkila), Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (1996).

Kirsten Harris: Senior Tutor in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. Author of Walt Whitman and British Socialism: 'The Love of Comrades' (2016), and articles on Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter and radical British politics. Other research interests include socialist literature and print culture, literary transatlanticism, and protest writing.

Sascha Pöhlmann: Lecturer, American Literary History, LMU Munich, Germany. Author of Future-Founding Poetry: Topographies of Beginnings from Whitman to the Twenty-First Century (2015), essays on Whitman's poetry and prose, as well as its importance to Mark Z. Danielewsi's fiction, poetry on 9/11, or Cascadian Black Metal. His other research interests include Thomas Pynchon and unpopular culture.

Incoming Translators:

Marina Camboni: Professor of American Literature at the University of Macerata, Italy. She is the President of AISNA, the Italian Association of North American Studies and has published a number of articles and essays in journals and in books: on modernism, poetry and poetics, on style, on American English, on the semiotics of language and culture, on cultural theory, on women’s writing and language, on translation, and on a number of American writers.

Éric Athenot: Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne). On top of writing articles and giving papers in France and abroad, he has written a small book on the poet (Whitman, poète-cosmos, Belin, 2002); has carried out the first French translation of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (José Corti, 2008); and has been invited on several occasions to speak about Whitman on France-Culture, the French public radio station devoted to general culture.

Mario Corona: has taught Anglo-American (and occasionally English) Literature at the Universities: Bocconi, Statale, and IULM in Milan; Messina, Bergamo. Instructor of Italian at Columbia University (1963-65). First Italian translator of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass (Marsilio 1996), now working at the final 1891-92 edition. Author of a volume on the first 25 chapters of Moby-Dick (Prima del viaggio, Pitagora 1984), of the commented reader I puritani d’America (1973; 2009) and of a full-length study of F. O. Matthiessen’s critical work.

Symposium Keynote:

M Wynn Thomas, O.B.E.: Emyr Humphreys Chair of Welsh Writing in English, Swansea University. He is a specialist in American poetry and in the two literatures of modern Wales.  He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, and received the highest honour of the National Eisteddfod of Wales in 2000. His books include the prize-winning Morgan Llwyd: ei gyfeillion a'i gyfnod (1991), The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry (1987), Internal Difference: writing in Twentieth Century Wales (1992), Corresponding Cultures: the two literatures of modern Wales (1999), 'The Page's Drift': R.S.Thomas at Eighty (1993) and DiFfinio Dwy Lenyddiaeth Cymru (1995). Professor Thomas's important study of Walt Whitman's poetry in the context of both the US and the UK, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman US-Whitman UK, was published in 2005. In June 2007 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the two literatures of Wales.