���ϴ�����

���ϴ����� is celebrating the 200^th birthday of Henry David Thoreau today and reflecting on the past and present work on campus to advance the legacy of his literary genius.

The late ���ϴ����� faculty member and SUNY Distinguished Professor of English, Walter Harding, was arguably the most influential scholar of Thoreau in the 20^th century. Harding taught in ���ϴ�����’s English department from 1956 to 1982, wrote seven books on Thoreau, including “The Day of Henry Thoreau,” which remains a widely cited biography, and helped found the Thoreau Society in 1941.

“Thoreau has a large footprint on our campus, and we treasure the legacy left by Dr. Harding and other ���ϴ����� scholars in keeping Thoreau’s writings fresh and relevant,” said Paul Schacht, professor of English at ���ϴ�����. “Their work has been carried forward in both courses and research projects to ensure our students and colleagues experience Thoreau’s philosophy and writings.”

Schacht, who will be attending the Thoreau Society’s Annual Gathering this week to celebrate the birthday bicentennial, is director of ���ϴ�����’s , launched in 2014, which is digitizing Thoreau’s writings to promote world-wide, online discussion of the author’s works among scholars, students and general readers.

“Thoreau wrote as he lived: deliberately,” said Schacht, “and through open-source tools, Digital Thoreau makes it possible for anyone to read Thoreau’s works as deliberately as he wrote them. We continue to expand Digital Thoreau by adding new tools and new content.”

Digital Thoreau coincides with a variety of open-source publishing initiatives by ���ϴ�����’s Milne Library, including the imminent production of a ���ϴ����� published re-release of Walter Harding’s “Annotated Walden,” which will be available both digitally and in print.

Also at ���ϴ�����, the Thoreau-Harding Project is an ongoing English Department course directed by Professor of English Ed Gillin, in which students are constructing a cabin simulating the one Thoreau built in 1845 at Walden Pond. The work provides an unconventional experience for students to supplement Thoreau’s readings.

In addition, ���ϴ����� launched the annual Harding lecture in 2004 in honor of Walter Harding. His wife, the late Marjorie Brook Harding, created an endowment to make the lecture series possible and significantly enlarged the endowment in 2010, assuring that generations of ���ϴ����� students and faculty will benefit from Walter Harding's tradition of scholarship and learning.