Zachary Turpin
Associate Professor
English Department
University of Idaho
875 Perimeter Drive MS 1102
Moscow, Idaho 83844-1102
Zachary Turpin researches nineteenth-century periodical culture, digital humanities, textual recovery, and the history of epistemology and the sciences.
Zachary Turpin joined the English Department at the University of Idaho in 2017. His research focuses on nineteenth-century periodical culture, archival research methods, digital humanities, and the history of epistemology and the sciences. Prior to joining the University of Idaho, he rediscovered two book-length works by the poet Walt Whitman: a novella (Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, 1852) and an urban men’s wellness manifesto (Manly Health and Training, 1858). Besides hunting for further possible Whitman publications, Turpin has worked with a number of collaborators to uncover unaccounted-for periodical works by American authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Rebecca Harding Davis, Emma Lazarus, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles W. Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Anne Sexton, and Cormac McCarthy.
In 2017, he became a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and in 2020 he was awarded a short-term Peterson Fellowship by the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA). His teaching experience includes courses on American literature pre-1865, archival research methods, Great American Novels of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, nineteenth-century women’s literature, American Transcendentalism, and academic and professional writing.- Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Houston, 2017
- M.A., English Literature, College of Charleston and the Citadel, 2007
- B.A., English Literature, New York University, 2004
Books
- Whitman in New Orleans: A Cultural Biography of His Southern Sojourn, with Stefan Schöberlein. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2025 (forthcoming).
- All Is Not Lost. New York: Liveright, 2025 (forthcoming).
- The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman—The Journalism: Volume III, 1848-1859, ed. Douglas Noverr, Jason Stacy, and Zachary Turpin. Peter Lang, 2024 (forthcoming).
- Radicals: Audacious Writings by American Women, 1830-1930, 2 vols., eds. Zachary Turpin and Meredith Stabel, intro. by Zachary Turpin, forewords by Roxane Gay and Katha Pollitt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2021.
- Every Hour, Every Atom: A Collection of Walt Whitman’s Early Notebooks and Fragments, eds. Zachary Turpin and Matt Miller. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020.
- Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, by Walt Whitman, ed. and intro. Zachary Turpin. University of Iowa Press, 2017.
- Manly Health and Training, by Walt Whitman, ed. and intro. by Zachary Turpin. Phaidon / Regan Arts, 2016.
Articles and Notes
- “Have You Seen Me?: Missing Works of 19th-Century American Literature,” Commonplace (forthcoming, 2024).
- “The Brooklyn Register (1859) and the Last Appearance of ‘Paumanok,’ Whitman’s Travelling Bachelor,” WWQR (forthcoming, Winter 2023).
- “Cormac McCarthy’s Interviews in Tennessee and Kentucky, 1968-1980,” with Dianne C. Luce, Cormac McCarthy Journal 20.2 (October 2022), 108-135.
- “‘The Indications’ (1857): An Early Whitman Imitation,” WWQR 39.4 (Spring 2022), 209-212.
- “Melville Off the Wagon,” Leviathan 24.2 (June 2022), 76-83.
- “‘Glorious Times for Newspaper Editors and Correspondents’: Whitman at the New Orleans Daily Crescent, 1848-1849,” with Stefan Schöberlein, WWQR 39.1 (Summer 2021), 1-50.
- “Searching for Proud Antoinette: Evidence and Prospects for Whitman’s Phantom Novel,” WWQR 37.3/4 (Winter/Spring 2020), 225-247.
- “‘Twilight Was Their Child’: Uncollected Poems, Letters, and a Short Story by Paul Laurence Dunbar,” Resources for American Literary Study 40.1 (2019), 155-182.
- “‘The First Year of Anne Sexton, Poet’: Four Rediscovered Poems and an Essay,” with Erin C. Singer. Fugue 55 (Fall 2018), 7-22.
- “Melville’s ‘October Mountain’: A Mystery Solved?” Leviathan 19.1 (March 2017).
- “Melville’s Letter to the World,” Leviathan 19.1 (March 2017).
- “Introduction to ‘Life and Adventures of Jack Engle’,” WWQR 34.3/4 (Winter/Spring 2017).
- “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass Goes to England,” ALR 49.2 (Winter 2017).
- “Whitman in the Abstract,” WWQR 34.3/4 (Fall 2016).
- “Yearning to Breathe Free: Emma Lazarus’s Queer Innovations,” J19 4.2 (Fall 2016).
- “The Knickerbocker and ‘Isle of the Cross’,” Leviathan 18.2 (June 2016).
- “Seventy-Three Uncollected Short Works by Rebecca Harding Davis,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 35.1 (Spring 2016).
- “Introduction to Walt Whitman’s ‘Manly Health and Training’,” WWQR 33.3/4 (Spring 2016).
- “Two Newly Recovered Pieces of Journalism by Ambrose Bierce,” ALR 48.3 (Spring 2016).
- “Melville, Mathematics, and Platonic Idealism,” Leviathan 17.2 (June 2015).
- “Hawthorne the Unreliabilist: His Epistemology in ‘The Custom-House’ and Other Prefaces,” ESQ 60.4 (Winter 2014).
- “‘Der Hyphen’: A Newly Rediscovered Poem by L. Frank Baum,” Baum Bugle 58.3 (Winter 2014).
Research Projects
- Whitman Redux. University of Iowa Press (forthcoming).
- Peterson Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA), 2020-21.
- UI CDIL Digital Scholarship Fellowship, 2019.
- UI Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2018.
- UI Seed Grant, 2018.
- UI Summer Fellowship, Center for Digital Innovation and Learning (CDIL) / College of Graduate Studies (COGS), 2018.
- Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress, 2017-18.
- Future Faculty Fellowship (F3), University of Houston, 2015.