Arts of Place/Oxford Centre for Life-Writing Summer Lecture: Karen Karbiener on Whitman
“Who wishes to walk with me?”: Walt Whitman, Poet of Places
Tuesday 2nd June 2026, 4pm, Lecture Room 3, Arts Building, University of Birmingham Edgbaston Campus. Free and open to all. Registration recommended: please follow the links here.
Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own. For 2026 we welcome Professor Karen Karbiener from New York University.
How does a poet become profoundly connected to places he’s never been or even written about?
Walt Whitman (1819–1892), often celebrated as ‘The Poet of New York’, never travelled beyond North America and spent most of his life in only a few locations. Yet he remains a living presence in Bolton, a former Lancashire mill town, where an annual ‘Whitman Walk’ through the surrounding countryside has taken place, with occasional interruptions, since 1887.
This unlikely connection began in the 1880s with the Eagle Street College, a group of Bolton readers—clerks, professionals, and workers—who gathered to read and discuss Leaves of Grass. The group corresponded with Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, sent him birthday greetings, and helped circulate his work in Britain, interpreting his poetry as a powerful articulation of democracy, equality, and social transformation.
Examining life-writing, poetry, and place, this lecture will appeal to anyone curious about how readers and communities shape a poet’s legacy—and how literature can travel far beyond the locations of a writer’s own life. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of American literature, history, and transatlantic cultural history. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.
Professor Karen Karbiener is an internationally recognised Whitman scholar and a Distinguished Teaching Award-winning professor at New York University. She has published widely and curated several exhibitions on the poet; she is also president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a non-profit organisation serving as an organising centre for cultural activism and poetry-related events. Karen is currently at work on American Kosmos: The Lives, Loves, and Worlds of Walt Whitman (Harper Collins, 2027), the first full-length biography of the poet in over 25 years.
After the event, please join Arts of Place for a complimentary wine reception.
The event will be recorded and made available on the Arts of Place and OCLW websites soon after.
Location: The Arts Building is R16 in the Red Zone shown on this campus map. Regular trains from Birmingham New Street stop at University Station (10-minutes’ walk from the venue). You are warmly invited to explore the campus if you have time. You’ll find a park-like space in the ‘Green Heart’ and a range of cafes, including at the Bramall Music Building near the clock tower.