Education

PhD, English, University of Texas at Austin
MA, Library and Information Science, University of Iowa
MFA, Poetry, University of Iowa
BA, English, Washington University in St. Louis

Specializations 

Digital Humanities; Cultural Heritage Informatics; Social Media; Archives; Book History; Online Reading; Literature and Creative Writing; Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture

Biography

Micah Bateman is a researcher, essayist, and poet from rural East Texas. His research focuses on American cultural heritage from small community archives to big social-media platforms. He is at work on a grant from the Institute of Museum & Library Services to investigate strategic practices and partnerships for coordinating inclusive community memory in rural communities, and his book project, Lyric Publics: The Uses of Poetry in American Social-Media Campaigns, charts the circulations of poets and poems on social-media platforms as political engagement in the Trump era.

Recent Projects and Presentations

• Co-author, Dublin Core Quick Start: An Introductory Guide to Metadata, University of Iowa, 2024 
• Co-PI, OVPR Community Engaged Scholars, $50,000, 2023
• Co-PI, “Activating Archives in Remote Communities: Training Rural LIS Professionals for Inclusive Memory Work,” Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program, Institute of Museum and Library Services, $149,996, 2022
• Member, Walt Whitman Archive advisory board, 2022-present
• Editor: The Walt Whitman Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
• Researching the Reading Experience in the Digital Age: “Lyric Publics: Sharing Poems after Trump,” Copenhagen, DK, June 2024. 
• American Literature Association: With Caitlin Matheis and Jennifer Burek Pierce, “Archiving the Digital Literary Sphere,” “Unique Archives” panel sponsored by the Digital Americanists organization, Chicago, IL, May 2024. 
• Critical Approaches to Black Media: “Distributed Blackishness: The Uses of Black Poets Among Candidates of the 2020 Democratic Primaries,” “Politics and Activism” panel, New Orleans, LA, February 2024. 
• Association for Library and Information Science Education: Panelist, “Developing Training for Rural Library Workers to Build Inclusive Archives” roundtable, Milwaukee, WI, October 2023. 
• Association for Small and Rural Libraries: Panelist, “Small Libraries, Big Memories: Empowering Your Communities to Tell Their Stories” virtual roundtable, September 2023. 
• Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing: Panelist, “Expressive Networks: Poetry, Twitter, and Virality” roundtable, virtual, June 2023. 
• American Literature Association: “Dragging Whitman: Online Jokes, Memes, and C@nonicity,” “Walt Whitman and Humor” panel, Boston, MA, May 2023. 
• American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies: “The Trials of Elizabeth Warren: Phillis Wheatley Peters and the 2020 Campaign,” “When the 1700s Go Diachronic: Music, Fashion Politics” panel, St. Louis, MO, March 2023. 

Recent Publications

• Bateman, Micah. "Incorporating Multitudes: Whitman, Occupy, and Liberalism's Neutrality Fantasy." Expressive Networks: Poetry & Platform Cultures (Amherst College Press), forthcoming. 
• Matheis, Caitlin, and Bateman, Micah. "Songs of Ourselves 2.0: The Circulations and Citations of Nineteenth-Century American Poetry on Twitter." Nineteenth-Century Data Collective (Princeton University Libraries), forthcoming. 
• Bateman, Micah. "'Distributed Blackishness': The Uses of Black American Poets among Candidates of the 2020 US Democratic Primaries." Book History, vol. 27, no. 1, 2024. 
• Bateman, Micah. "Whitman's Web: The Political Poet 2.0." The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman (Oxford University Press: 2024), pp. 198-222. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780192894847.013.6