Last Iowa Bibliophiles before we break for the summer!

Join exhibit co-curators, Stephanie M. Blalock (Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, University of Iowa Libraries) and Brandon James O’Neil (Ph.D. Candidate in English) for a tour of “Walt Whitman: A Bicentennial Celebration.” They will also give visitors an exclusive look at a variety of books from the University of Iowa’s extensive collection of Whitman materials that are not on display in the Gallery cases.

Stephanie M. Blalock is the Associate Editor of the online Walt Whitman Archive and the Associate Editor of Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, the  journal of record for Whitman Studies, which is now an open-access, online-only publication. She is the Associate Editor of the online Vault at Pfaff’s, the author of “Go to Pfaff’s!”: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon (2014), and the author of essays on Whitman as a fiction writer. Her discoveries of the previously unknown extent of the reprints of Whitman’s fiction has led to a rethinking of the importance of Whitman’s early fiction.

Brandon James O’Neil is the Managing Editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. His essay, “Meditations on the Birth of Self: Archetypal Revelations in Whitman’s 1855 ‘Song of Myself’” was recently published in Quadrant, the journal of the Carl G. Jung Foundation. His research interests include Whitman and psychological perspectives in American literature.

In addition to the exhibit curated by Blalock, O’Neil, and Ed Folsom (Roy J. Carver Professor of English), the University of Iowa is celebrating the Bicentennial of Whitman’s birth and Iowa as an international center of Whitman Studies by offering “Walt Whitman at 200: The Bicentennial Symposium,” a series of talks by some of the most renowned Whitman scholars in the world. All symposium events will be held in the Main Library Gallery; they are free and open to the public. A full schedule of events is available here.