Prof. Karen Karbiener Awarded $250,000 Grant for Walt Whitman Project

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a $250,000 grant for a project entitled “Walt Whitman’s Journalism: Finding the Poet in the Brooklyn Daily Times.” A multi-institutional effort, the project is being led by a team of top Whitman scholars including Liberal Studies Professor Karen Karbiener. Their efforts promise to shed light on key years for Whitman and the nation just prior to the Civil War, while Whitman was living and working in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Karbiener is an expert on Whitman’s New York years and has published widely on the subject, including two essays on Whitman’s involvement with the Brooklyn Daily Times: “Reconstructing Whitman’s Desk at the Brooklyn Daily Times” (Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2015), 21-50) and “Bridging Brooklyn and Bohemia: How the Brooklyn Daily Times Brought Whitman Closer to Pfaff’s” (Whitman Among the Bohemians, ed. Susanna Levin and Edward Whitley (University of Iowa, 2014), 1-18). A public-facing scholar and cultural activist, she is President of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a non-profit organization with the mission of celebrating and protecting New York’s literary legacy.