Matt Cohen

Biography

Matt Cohen works in the fields of early American literature, digital archives, and the history of the book. He is affiliate faculty in American Studies and Comparative Literature, and a member of the Native American and Indigenous Studies collective at UT. His essays have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Mississippi Quarterly, and Book History. He is the editor of a collection of letters by the creator of Tarzan, titled Brother Men: The Correspondence of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Herbert T. Weston (Duke UP, 2005), and the author of a book on early American writing in the context of seventeenth-century English and Native American communications technologies, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). He is writing a book on intercultural theory and method in early American studies and, with Jeffrey Glover, editing a collection of essays on media and power in the colonial Americas, Early American Mediascapes (under advance contract from the University of Nebraska Press).

A contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive, Cohen directs several projects, including digital editions of Horace Traubel's nine-volume biography of the poet and of the first book-length translation of Whitman's poetry into Spanish, Álvaro Armando Vasseur's Walt Whitman: Poemas. Under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities program in Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, the UT branch of the Whitman Archive is digitizing Whitman's marginalia and his annotations on other writers' works. For the latest on work in Cohen's humanities lab, click the "Digital Projects" tab above.

With Lars Hinrichs, he served as co-director for "The Digital and the Human(ities)," the 2010-2011 theme for the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies (http://www.utexas.edu/cola/insts/tilts-2011/). In 2008-09 Cohen was a Donald D. Harrington Fellow at the University of Texas; he has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Huntington Library, the American Council for Learned Societies, the Newberry Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. For The Networked Wilderness, he was awarded the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship from the Texas A & M Center for Humanities Research. Cohen was a history major at Oberlin College and holds a doctorate in American Studies from the College of William & Mary.