Effective November 1st, 2019, the makeup of the board has changed. Kevin McMullen has taken over duties as President, while Stefan Schöberlein moved into the position of Vice President. The Digital Americanists would also like to welcome Hayley C. Stefan aboard, who will be our new outreach director.
The current board thus looks as follows:
Kevin McMullen (President) is a postdoctoral research associate in the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has worked on the staff of the Walt Whitman Archive since 2010, and currently serves as the project manager and an associate editor. He is also the project manager of the NEH-funded Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive, as well as the co-creator and editor of Fanny Fern in The New York Ledger, an online digital edition of the newspaper writings of the nineteenth century writer Fanny Fern. His has published essays on both Whitman and Fern, and his ongoing personal research focuses on literary responses to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Stefan Schöberlein (Vice President) is an assistant professor of English and the Digital Humanities at Marshall University. He contributes to the Walt Whitman Archive and is one of the co-editors of the Movable Project, a geospatial, digital archive aimed at preserving and highlighting narratives of recovery from substance use disorder in Appalachia. His work has been published in journals like Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, American Literature, and American Literary Realism.
Stephanie M. Blalock (Secretary/Treasurer) is a Digital Humanities Librarian in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, at the University of Iowa Libraries. She is the Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and The Vault at Pfaff’s. She is the author of “Go to Pfaff’s!”: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon, a peer-reviewed digital edition published by Lehigh University Press and The Vault at Pfaff’s, and she has also published several essays in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Her research focuses on Walt Whitman at Pfaff’s Beer Cellar and the reprinting and circulation of Whitman’s short fiction.
Hayley C. Stefan (Director of Outreach) is an English Ph.D. candidate and 2019-2020 Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow at the University of Connecticut. She focuses on the relationship between disability & race in contemporary multi-ethnic U.S. literature & culture, with wider research & teaching interests encompassing children’s/YA literature, comparative ethnic studies, digital humanities, & disability/mad studies. Her research has been published recently in Disability Studies Quarterly and MELUS.