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Steven Olsen-Smith

Professor and Director of Melville’s Marginalia Online

Steven Olsen-Smith joined the Boise State University English department in 2000, specializing in early and 19th-century American literature, especially Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Stephen Crane. He has served past appointments as the Holland H. Coors Endowed Visiting Chair in the Department of English and Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy. His work combines traditional archival research and analytical bibliography with digital technology. As General Editor of Melville’s Marginalia Online, he is the primary scholar responsible for tracking the recovery of the author’s personal library, which numbered some 1,000 volumes when it was dispersed following his death in 1891. At Boise State he directs the work of student interns in electronically editing Melville’s markings and notes in surviving volumes, and in study and appreciation of the author’s thought and craft.

Olsen-Smith’s published research on Walt Whitman includes an electronic edition (published by the online journal ScholarlyEditing.org) of the poet’s “Live Oak, with Moss” sequence. Whitman apparently wrote the 12 love poems in response to a failed same-sex attachment. But he never published it in intact, and it was nearly lost to scholarship. Broken apart and dispersed among other poems in the “Calamus” cluster of the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, its narrative of love and heartache erased, the sequence was restored to its originally inscribed state by Olsen-Smith through digital enhancement and analysis of different ink mediums and offsets in the surviving manuscript leaves. The restoration illuminates a significant biographical episode in the life of the poet, as well as an important phase in his poetic and philosophical development.

Olsen-Smith has used similar methods of digital enhancement to recover erased pencil markings and annotations at Melville’s Marginalia Online, where project staff and students apply computational approaches to Melville’s reading and use of sources in his writings. His work on erased marginalia in Melville’s copy of Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, a major source for Moby-Dick, reveals the author’s drafts of finely crafted poetic allusions and similes he would go on to use in manuscript composition, as well as groundbreaking evidence about Melville’s changing conceptions for the catastrophic conclusion of his masterwork. Olsen-Smith has guest-edited several special issues of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, with contributions by project editors and students on newly recovered holograph evidence and digital text analysis of Melville’s reading practices.

Olsen-Smith enjoys trail running, mountain biking, cross-country skiing, reading for pleasure, and listening to classical music. His wife Sarah is a nurse with the Boise School District, and they have two children.

Education

  • Ph.D., English, University of Delaware
  • M.A., English, University of Delaware
  • B.A., English, California State University, Humboldt

Interests

Melville, Whitman, and Crane; early and 19th-Century American literature; textual criticism; digital applications and approaches in literary studies.

Recent Publications

  • “The Technical Development and Expanding Scope of Melville’s Marginalia Online” (co-authored with Peter Norberg) in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 25.2 (June 2023), 61-85.
  • “‘Germinous Seeds’: Hawthorne’s Creative Influence on Melville” (co-authored with Jonathan A. Cook, Elisa Barney Smith, Remington Lambie, Abby Price, and Hunter Tonkin) in Leviathan: a Journal of Melville Studies 24.3 (October 2022), 7-49.
  • “Books and Marginalia, Real and Virtual” in A New Companion to Herman Melville, eds. Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge (Wiley Blackwell, 2022), 283-296.
  • Melville in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates (University of Iowa Press, 2015).
  • “The Inscription of Walt Whitman’s ‘Live Oak, with Moss’ Sequence: A Restorative Edition,” Scholarly Editing: the Annual of the Association for Scholarly Editing 33 (Winter 2012).
  • “Herman Melville’s Copy of Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale and the Composition of Moby-Dick,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21.3 (Fall 2010), 1-77.

Courses

  • ENGL 275 Methods of Literary Studies
  • ENGL 277 Survey of American Literature, Origins to the Civil War
  • ENGL 338 Literature in Translation (Indigenous Oral Narrative and Myth)
  • ENGL 338 Literature in Translation (German Romanticism)
  • ENGL 375 Early American Literature
  • ENGL 377 American Renaissance
  • ENGL 424 Seminar (sections on Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson)
  • ENGL 497 Special Topics (Digital Humanities)

Additional Websites