Zachary Turpin joined the English Department at the University of Idaho in 2017. His research focuses on nineteenth-century periodical culture, digital humanities, textual recovery, and the history of epistemology and the sciences. His forthcoming book, Whitman Redux, reexamines the development of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in light of the poet's serialized periodical prose of the 1850s, particularly Whitman's second novella (Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, 1852) and his pseudonymous wellness manifesto (Manly Health and Training, 1858). Besides hunting up further possible Whitman publications, Turpin also pursues unaccounted-for periodical works by a number of major American women authors of the nineteenth century, including Rebecca Harding Davis, Emma Lazarus, Susan Warner, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In 2017, he became a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, where he has been searching for a number of missing American literary texts, analyzing literary networks in antebellum New York City literary newspapers, and exploring the possibilities for large-scale public engagement and education using digital archives. His teaching experience includes courses on the history of short fiction and of drama, American literature pre-1865, Walt Whitman, and academic and professional writing.
