English Professors Mara N. Scanlon and D. Brady Earnhart have been interviewed about Walt Whitman for this week’s broadcast of the public radio program “With Good Reason.” Their interview, called “Whitman at War,” can be heard online at www.withgoodreasonradio.org/2009/07/whitman-at-war.
In 1862, poet Walt Whitman went to Fredericksburg, searching in field hospitals for his brother who had been wounded in a Civil War battle. Whitman was so shocked by the bloodshed that he worked as a nurse for years through the end of the war. Scanlon and Earnhart say Whitman helped heal wounded soldiers just as he hoped his poetry could mend the war-torn nation.
Earnhart and Scanlon are working with UMW instructional technology specialist James Groom on the digital humanities project “Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman.” Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project involves collaboration with three other universities.
A web site designed by Groom, http://lookingforwhitman.org, will connect students at UMW and universities in New Jersey and New York—each in areas pivotal to Whitman’s life and work. As students investigate those locations, they will share research via digital platforms. At UMW this fall, Scanlon, Earnhart and Groom will teach “Digital Whitman,” a seminar incorporating the Whitman archive at the Library of Congress as well as the nearby site of a Civil War hospital, Chatham.
Scanlon, associate professor of English, received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia, an M.A. and a Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Earnhart, visiting assistant professor of English, received and a bachelor’s degree from The College of William and Mary, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia.
“With Good Reason” is the only statewide public radio program in Virginia. It hosts scholars from Virginia’s public colleges and universities who discuss the latest in research, pressing social issues and the curious and whimsical. “With Good Reason” is produced for the Virginia Higher Education Broadcasting Consortium by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and is broadcast in partnership with public radio stations in Virginia and Washington, D.C.