For supporting this project, we wish to thank the U. S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia (IATH),  the University of Maryland and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and the College of William and Mary, for providing resources of all kinds in order to make this project possible. MITH has also published, as a volume of their MITHologies publication, Reflections on the Classroom Electric, a collection of essays written by the authors below exploring their experiences in creating The Classroom Electric. Primary Source Media has generously provided us with etext of out-of-copyright texts of Walt Whitman. Many other schools, libraries, and individuals--too numerous to list here--have also advanced this project. Additional credits can be found on some of the individual pages below.

We wish to give special thanks for the contributions of our editorial assistants, Robert K. Nelson, Geoffrey Saunders Schramm, Lara Vetter, and Jarom McDonald. Their work has been exemplary.

SUSAN BELASCO is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. A past chair of the Modern Language Association Committee on Information Technology, Belasco has been a faculty associate on several grants for integrating technologies into the classroom, including a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Curriculum Development Grant awarded to California State University, Los Angeles. In addition to publishing articles on the use of computer technology in writing programs, she is also the author of several articles and reviews on nineteenth-century American women writers. She is the editor of Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 by Margaret Fuller (Illinois 1991) and Ruth Hall by Fanny Fern (Penguin 1996). She is the co-editor of "These Sad but Glorious Days": Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850 by Margaret Fuller (Yale 1991); Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Virginia 1995); and Approaches to Teaching Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (MLA 2000).

STEPHANIE BROWNER is an associate professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Berea College, a small, liberal arts college in Kentucky that is dedicated to providing tuition-free education to promising students with limited economic resources. Browner teaches American literature, African American literature and interdisciplinary general education courses. She integrates technology regularly into her courses, asking students to use and evaluate relevant Internet sources. Browner has published articles in a range of journals including American Quarterly and PMLA (forthcoming) and is in the final stages of revising her book manuscript, "Somatic Expertise: Fiction and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century America."  She is the co-author of Literature and the Internet (Garland, 2000).

ED FOLSOM is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa. He has served as editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review since 1983. He is the editor of Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays (U Iowa P, 1994); co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow!, 1981, rev.ed., 1997); co-editor of Walt Whitman and the World (U Iowa P, 1996); and author of Walt Whitman's Native Representations (Cambridge UP, 1994). His essays on Whitman, Dickinson, and other American poets have appeared in journals like American Literature, Studies in the American Renaissance, Shenandoah, and Philological Quarterly, as well as in numerous collections like The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Historical Approaches to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson: The Best from American Literature, and Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. With Ken Price he serves as co-director of The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive, and as co-editor of Walt Whitman: Major Authors on CD-ROM (Primary Source Media, 1997). He teaches courses in Whitman and Dickinson at the undergraduate and graduate levels at Iowa.

EZRA GREENSPAN is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including Walt Whitman and the American Reader (Cambridge UP, 1990), George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (Penn State, and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman (Cambridge UP, 1995). He is also the co-editor of the prize-winning new annual, Book History. He has received fellowships for his work from the NEH and the American Philosophical Society. He teaches a graduate seminar on Whitman and Dickinson at his university and continues to publish on both of them (most recently, on the collection of books and letters purchased by his school's library from the estate of Dickinson's friend, Emily Fowler Ford).

JAY GROSSMAN is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, and teaches and writes about eighteenth and nineteenth century American literature and culture, especially Emerson and Whitman; the history of the book; and the history of sexuality. He co-edited (with Betsy Erkkila), Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies (Oxford, 1996), and is currently completing a book-length study entitled "Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation." In addition to essays on Whitman and Hawthorne, he has published "The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen's Whitman, Whitman's Matthiessen" in American Literature (December 1998); the essay is an early section of his next project, a cultural biography of the American literary critic F. O. Matthiessen.

KIRSTEN SILVA GRUESZ is assistant professor of Literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American poetry, New World studies, and Chicano/Latino literature. She is completing a book on poetry and national identity in the nineteenth-century Americas, Ambassadors of Culture, in which Whitman figures prominently. Gruesz has contributed entries to The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia, as well as essays on nineteenth-century U.S. and Spanish American poetry to American Literary History, Revista de Estudios Hispanicos, and Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. She has been integrating computers in the classroom through email discussions and journals, and teaching the work of Chicano "cyberpochos" on the World Wide Web. She is particularly interested in multicultural, bilingual, and transnational issues as they relate to new teaching technologies, and will link this project to other initiatives on electronic pedagogy as they emerge from the University of California system and from nearby Silicon Valley.

ELLEN LOUISE HART is coeditor (with Martha Nell Smith) of Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (Paris Press 1998). Hart wrote her dissertation (UC-Santa Cruz) on editing Dickinson's manuscripts with a focus on the letters, and is the author of various articles on related subjects. With Smith and Marta Werner, she edits the Dickinson Electronic Archives. Hart has taught in the Writing Program at the University of California-Santa Cruz since 1984; she also teaches for the Educational Opportunity Programs and the Literature Department. She is also the co-editor of the Dickinson selection in the Heath Anthology of American Literature (a teaching anthology). She serves as Treasurer of the Emily Dickinson International Society.

ROBERT S. LEVINE is a professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Maryland. His teaching interests are in nineteenth century American literary and cultural studies. From 1985 to 1992 he served as Book Review Editor for Resources for American Literary Studies. For his writing, he has received fellowships from the NEH and the University of Maryland's Committee on Africa in the Americas. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge UP, 1989) and Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (U North Carolina P, 1997), and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998) and of a Bedford Cultural Edition of William Wells Brown's Clotel,. His essays have appeared in books and journals including American Literature, American Literary History, The Columbia History of the American Novel, Teaching What You're Not, and Criticism and the Color Line. He is currently editing "Stand Still and See the Salvation": A Martin R. Delany Reader.

JAROM MCDONALD is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Maryland. His research interests are in late 19th/early 20th century literature and literary history, especially from a new historical point-of-view. He also works in humanities computing and hypertext theory, and is currently the project manager for the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

ROBERT K. NELSON is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the College of William & Mary.  He is currently working on his dissertation, "The Bonds of Benevolence: The Politics of Friendship in Antebellum Reform," a study of the ideals and practices of sociality and sexuality in the antebellum reform community.  He is also project manager for the Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive and Technical Liaison for the Modern Languages and Literatures department at William & Mary.

KENNETH M. PRICE is a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He served as editor of South Central Review (the journal of the South Central Modern Language Association) from 1988-1992 and as Executive Director of SCMLA in 1993. He is the co-editor of Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman (Kent State UP, 1984); editor of Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge UP, 1996); and author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century (Yale UP, 1990). With Ed Folsom he has co-edited Walt Whitman: Major Authors on CD-ROM (Primary Source Media, 1997). He is also co-director of The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive.

GEOFFREY SAUNDERS SCHRAMM, a PhD Candidate in English and Women's Studies certificate student at Maryland, is working on his dissertation entitled "Man Enough: Fraternity, Male Same-Sex Desire, and Citizenship in the American Renaissance," which includes three chapters on Whitman. In addition to being on the FIPSE project team, he is also a member of the Dickinson Electronic Archives. His essay "Confessions of a Dick Lover: Gay Masochism, Feminist Sadism and Queer Aporia" is included in the forthcoming anthology Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire (Four Walls, Eight Windows, 2001).

MARTHA NELL SMITH is a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. The author of Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson and co-author of Comic Power in Emily Dickinson, Martha Nell Smith initiated the founding of the Dickinson Editing Collective in 1992 in order to develop ways of digitizing all of Emily Dickinson's texts into a searchable database that will be a resource for scholars and more general readers alike. In developing the Dickinson Electronic Archives, Smith has given priority to producing a free and open public web site (user id: dickinson; password: ink_on_disc) offering various pedagogical tools exploring Dickinson's revising process, and her experimentations blending genres and media. Smith has developed a series of institutes and seminars in collaboration with the University of Maryland's Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies' CAST (Center Alliance for Secondary School Teachers) Program--sponsored in part by NEH--to develop classroom strategies in the teaching of American poetry, women's writings, and multicultural literatures. With Ellen Louise Hart, she has recently published Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Gilbert (Paris Press, 1998).  In 1999 Smith was appointed as the first director of UM's MITH, The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

LARA VETTER is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Maryland, College Park.  Her dissertation explores sexuality, gender, and nation in the philosophical writings of modernists H.D. and Mina Loy.  In addition to her work as General Editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives, she is co-editing the writings of Emily Dickinson and several members of Dickinson's family: her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, and her niece and nephew, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Ned Dickinson.

MARTA L. WERNER is assistant professor of English at D'Youville College, where she teaches American and English literature, creative writing, and interdisciplinary general education classes. She is the author/editor of Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (U of Michigan P, 1995) and the editor of Radical Scatters: An Electronic Archive of Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts (U of Michigan P, 1999). She is also editor, with Paul Voss, of a special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination on the poetics of the archive. Her essays have appeared in books and journals including Apex of the M, Chain, Emily Dickinson: Woman of Letters, A Poetics of Criticism, Profils Americans, ProFemina, Review, Text, and Voice, Text, and Hypertext at the Millennium. Werner has received grants for her work from the American Philosophical Society and the Bibliographical Society of America and her essay "'Most Arrows': Autonomy and Intertextuality in Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments" was awarded the Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize for the outstanding essay in textual studies published in 1998-1999.