Zachary Turpin joined the English Department at 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 U of I, 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.