History

Jason Stacy

Office Phone: 618-650-3966
Location: Peck Hall, Rm. 1235
Email: jstacy@siue.edu

Jason Stacy is Distinguished Research Professor of History and Director of Social Science Education at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He earned his Ph.D. in History from Loyola University Chicago and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, print culture, intellectual history, and the literary culture of the American Midwest, with particular interests in Walt Whitman and Edgar Lee Masters. His research examines how journalism, literature, and education have shaped democratic identity, public discourse, and collective memory in the United States.

Selected and Forthcoming Publications 

Walt Whitman, Journalist: Beyond the Poetic Foreground 1856-1860, with Stephanie Blalock, Kevin McMullen, and Stefan Schöberlein, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming.

“The Gig Newspaper: Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn Daily Times and the Challenges of Mid-Century Editorship,” with Stephanie M. Blalock, and Kevin McMullen, Stefan Schöberlein, American Periodicals, forthcoming.

“’Back There in Illinois’: Edgar Lee Masters and the Midwestern Populist Perspective,” Hearing the Heartland: Midwestern Writers Speak to the World, Jon Lauck, ed., Michigan State University Press, forthcoming.

“Containing Multitudes: Interdisciplinary Student Research at the Walt Whitman Archive,” with Stephanie Blalock, Kevin McMullen, and Stefan Schöberlein, Students in the Archives: Archival Pedagogy in Practice, Amanda Fox, Amanda Stuckey, eds., Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming.

Heartland Utopia: William Allen White on the Ideal Midwestern Town, with Charles Delgadillo, University Press of Kansas, 2026.

“The Midwestern Small Town: An Interpretive Problem with Mythical Proportions,” Between Loving and Leaving: Essays on the New Midwestern History, ed. Jon Lauck, University of Oklahoma Press, 2025.

"Edgar Lee Masters, Ann Rutledge's Grave, Petersburg, Illinois," Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest, Andy Oler, ed., Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2025.

“’One of the grand works of the world’: Walt Whitman and the Brooklyn Waterworks, 1856-1859,” with Stephanie M. Blalock, and Kevin McMullen, Stefan Schöberlein, Technology and Culture, 65, no. 1 (2024): 237-263.

“Walt Whitman’s Print Personas: 1840-1865,” in Ken Price, Stefan Schöberlein, eds., Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman, Oxford University Press, 2024.

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, University of Illinois Press, 2021.

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