We are rapidly approaching the end of 2024, and it’s been another busy year for the Critical Edition of Whitehead.

Much of the year was taken up with finishing the two volumes of Whitehead’s Essays and Articles (EA1 and EA2). The original plan was to submit EA2 in Q1 and EA1 in Q3, but after some discussion with the publisher, we ended up submitting both together in September in order to be able to have accurate bi-directional cross-referencing between the two volumes. Both are set to be published in 2025, and we’re very excited to get them into the hands of Whitehead scholars. We believe that this complete set of Whitehead’s essays—chronologically ordered and critically edited, with editorial introductions to each piece—is going to be a watershed moment for Whitehead scholarship, especially since some of the chapters have never been published before. This includes a short 1925 speech of Whitehead’s at the Wellesley College semi-centennial celebration which we discovered in Victor Lowe’s papers earlier this year.

Speaking of discoveries, it’s also worth mentioning that, with the help of Editorial Advisory Board member Ronny Desmet, we re-discovered Whitehead’s own copy of his The Principle of Relativity, which contains some of his own emendations. It had originally been given to one of Whitehead’s teaching assistants, C. Hillis Kaiser, but at some point had been donated to Princeton University Library. We are now in possession of scans of every page of the book that contained Whitehead’s emendations. Of course these will be incorporated into the critically edited version of the book, though it will be some years before we embark on editing it.

Aside from finishing the Essays and Articles volumes, the rest of the year was given over to beginning the work that we had scoped in the three-year NEH grant that we were awarded last year. Our scope of work for the grant essentially includes three prongs, which we’ll now summarize.

First, graduate students were tasked with transcribing (1) student notes slated for the final volume of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures (HL6) in year 1 of the grant, and (2) correspondence to and from Whitehead in years 2 and 3 of the grant. We are well ahead of schedule on this front: transcription for HL6 was finished in the middle of last year, and we’ve moved on to transcription of letters.

Second, Henning and Petek are editing the third volume of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures (HL3), covering fall 1927 to fall 1929. The interesting “hook” of this volume is that it covers the entire period in which Whitehead was composing and revising his Gifford Lectures that would become Process and Reality, and he brings this material into his Harvard classroom more than just a little. When all is said and done, it may well be possible to make new discoveries about the compositional history of PR, things that we could not have known before. In any case, we are nearing the end of verifying the accuracy of transcriptions of notes for the volume and will edit and submit it to EUP by the end of 2025 for publication in 2026.

Third, we have begun work on the first volume of Whitehead’s monographs, which will include Science and the Modern World, Religion in the Making, and Symbolism. Henning and Petek are being joined by long-time Process Studies editor Daniel A. Dombrowski for this volume. We are still working on generating accurate electronic versions of all editions that appeared in Whitehead’s lifetime. The finished manuscript is not due to EUP until the end of 2026 for publication in 2027, so this process took a bit of a backseat to work on HL3 this year.

To summarize the above, we expect to publish four more volumes of the CEW in the next three years, which will put us at six out of seventeen volumes completed. You can always find a summary of progress on all volumes of the Edition at whiteheadresearch.org/research/critical-edition.

Beyond the NEH grant work, we also recently submitted an anthology of essays on the significance of HL2 to EUP for publication (largely based on the 2022 HL2 conference), to be titled Whitehead at Harvard, 1925–1927. Like its predecessor, we think it ably demonstrates the depth and richness of the material to be found in the Harvard lectures.

Finally, let’s talk a bit about project funding. As was previously mentioned, this was the first year in which the CEW received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities through a Scholarly Editions and Translations grant. That funding is set to continue for the next two years, until the end of 2026. We will be reapplying next fall in the hopes of extending the grant for another three years, but this remains a difficult grant to win, and there are no guarantees.

If the project is to continue, we still must rely on private donors, even with the NEH’s help; if we fail to win a further three years on our next grant application, donations become all the more important. We want to take the time to thank our most generous supporters from the past year. We could not undertake this project without their support.

• Chesed, Inc.
• John Buchanan
• Nancy Frankenberry

The work of searching for, transcribing, and editing archival materials is time-consuming and costly. The NEH grant does require $50,000 in matching funds, so ongoing support of the community is welcome and needed. Even with this new grant, we still have decades of work ahead of us, and there is no guarantee that future NEH support will be forthcoming. If you are able to support our work with a donation, it would be much appreciated. Just follow this link.