Robert Whalen - NMU English

• B.A., York University
• M.A., Ph.D., University of Toronto
• rwhalen@nmu.edu
• Homepage

Robert Whalen’s research and teaching interests have included early modern history and culture, metaphysical poetry, John Donne, George Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth (née Sidney), Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Aphra Behn, English poetry of all periods, textual scholarship and scholarly editing, and digital humanities.

Whalen co-edits George Herbert: Complete Works in three volumes for Oxford University Press, a career-long project that has been supported over the years by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by multiple internal awards and administrative largesse at NMU. Volume one, English Prose, was published in April 2025. Samples from the Complete Works Digital Archive, the project’s comprehensive database of source manuscripts and first editions, may be viewed here.

Other books and articles include The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto, 2002); The Digital Temple (Virginia, 2012); “George Herbert, Cambridge Orator [I]” (Studies in Philology 123/4); “Neglected Witnesses to George Herbert’s Musae Responsoriae, and a New Poem, ‘Wren cum Chirothecis’” (Studies in Philology 120/2); “Restoring a Deleted Note in Valdesso’s Considerations” (George Herbert Journal 42/1-2); and “Cestus’ Reply to Æthiopissa” (Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 44/1). See vitae for more.

When he isn’t poring over manuscripts and rare books, Whalen sometimes reads. His interests, current and abiding, include Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, W. G. Sebald, the Hebrew Bible, and poetry by Alice Oswald, A. E. Stallings, Seamus Heaney, Joyce, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Kwame Dawes, Miłosz, Catullus, Baudelaire, and Rilke. 

All such writers, like those of the early modern era, are deeply invested in what the eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called “cosmic connections” (a.k.a. the humanist project). Whalen aspires to grasp what they have to share with us—materially, intellectually, spiritually—and to do so in the company of his students. The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence.