Wesley Raabe

I am Associate Professor in the department of English. Courses that I teach frequently include US Literature to 1865 (ENG 33001), a more intensive graduate version of same period (ENG 66101 and ENG 76101), Documents and Texts (66895), which introduces digital and editorial scholarship, Short Story (ENG 30031), Senior Seminar (ENG 43031) with varied topics (Dickinson, Whitman, Stowe, Twain, Delany, Morrison), and Methods in the Study of Literature (ENG 76706). I have also taught (recently) African American Literature to 1900 (ENG 33010) and Literature in English I (ENG 25001). 

My research interests, enumerated more abstractly, include the broader disciplines of bibliography, textual criticism, and digital humanities, and my teaching interests range across U.S. and African American literatures (into the early twentieth century), scholarly editing, research methods, sentimentalism (American and transatlantic), early Modernism, and regional writing. I welcome potential graduate student queries on working in early American literature or textual scholarship, and I welcome undergraduate student queries on independent research or thesis topics, especially in early American literature (pre-1920) and textual or editorial scholarship. Just send me an email. My physical office is in Satterfield Hall. Please send postal service mail to me addressed to 475 Janik Drive, in Kent, OH at ZIP 44242, care of the English Department office, Room 113.

In a recent essay (May 2022) on John G. C. Brainard, an early American poet from Hartford, Connecticut, I name him the author of the previously unidentified poem on colonization in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I seek to contextualize how Brainard, who was arguably a major poet in early America, was thoroughly forgotten by the mid-20th century. The essay ends with a question, about how poet Walt Whitman may have read Brainard's poetry, and I welcome queries or suggestions on the matter. I am also editor of the letters of Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, mother to the poet Walt Whitman, which is published on the Walt Whitman Archive. I have a forthcoming chapter on  Stowe's punctuation entitled “ ‘saying nothing, where nothing could be said’ : Reading Em-Dashes and Other Marks of Ellipsis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In it I argue that Stowe restored some of her National Era serial punctuation into the Illustrated Edition (1853). I have on the backburner—while I work on an edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (see below)—two articles, one on Shakespeare and moral philosophy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and another on the theory and practice of scholarly annotation.

Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

I am under contract (as of September 2023) as the volume editor for Uncle Tom's Cabin and as the textual editor for the proposed 34-volume series, entitled Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, by Oxford University Press. See our web site, at https://stowecollectedworks.org/, where you may find project announcements, our extensive handbook for volume editors, by general editors Susan Belasco, Joan Hedrick, and myself, and also see (or contribute to!) the in-progress bibliography of Stowe's periodical publications, by Susan Belasco.

Advisory Boards

• Member, Complete Works of Edith Wharton, General Ed. Carol J. Singley, Oxford University Press, https://whartoncompleteworks.org/volumes/ 
• Member, Scholarly Editing, https://scholarlyediting.org/
• Member, Nineteenth Century Ohio Literature, Ed. Jon Miller, http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/nineteenthcenturyohioliterature/