William Pannapacker was born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1968. The unusual name "Pannapacker" (often Anglicized as "Pennypacker") descends from the Dutch and German Mennonites who came to William Penn's colony in the 1680s seeking religious freedom. The family is most often remembered for operating stations on the Underground Railroad and providing more than 120 volunteers for the Union during the Civil War (including Galusha Pennypacker, the youngest general in American history, and Samuel Whitaker Pennypacker, who went on to become governor of Pennsylvania). After three centuries in America, Pannapacker's extended family has become multicultural; it now includes members who descend not only from Europe but from all over the world.

Though he is the beneficiary of several cultural and religious traditions, Pannapacker was raised in his mother's Catholic faith. He was educated in Philadelphia's parochial school system, but the diversity of faiths in his immediate family--Lutheran and Presbyterian, as well as Mennonite and Catholic--cultivated in him a sense of fellowship with other religious communities. He graduated from Saint Joseph's University, a Catholic liberal-arts college in Philadelphia, with an honors degree in English in 1990. After a period of varied employment--including stints as a deck hand, racquetball instructor, and advertising copywriter--Pannapacker decided to return to literary and historical study. He soon received a graduate fellowship from the University of Miami. During the following two years (1991-93) he wrote a thesis on Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, earned a master's degree in English, and discovered a passion for teaching at Miami-Dade Community College.

Determined to pursue a career as a scholar and a teacher, Pannapacker was offered a fellowship by Harvard University in 1993. Over the next six years he received six university-wide awards for scholarly essay writing (two Bowdoin Prizes for English Literature, one Arnold Prize for Bibliography, and three Bell Prizes for American Literature). Pannapacker was also awarded a Whiting Fellowship in national competition (1998-99), a Harvard Graduate Society Fellowship (1997-98), and the Hofer Prize for book collecting (1996). He completed his second master's degree in English in 1997 and received his doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard in 1999. Pannapacker's dissertation, Revised Lives, focuses on self-re-fashioning in nineteenth-century American literature, particularly the writings of Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman. A revised version of the dissertation has been published by Routledge as part of its "Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory" book series as Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship (2003). Reviews of the book can be found here.

During his seven years at Harvard, Pannapacker served as a teaching fellow and research assistant for Sacvan Bercovitch, Lawrence Buell, Alan Heimert, Neil Levine, and Werner Sollors (Profiles). For two years at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute he assisted editors Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Randall Burkett in the production of the Harvard Guide to African-American History. For four years as a teaching fellow and lecturer, Pannapacker directed junior tutorials and senior honors theses in Harvard's Department of History and Literature headed by Stephen Greenblatt. He also taught or assisted courses in American literature and American studies at the Harvard Extension School and Brandeis University.

Pannapacker has presented numerous scholarly papers, including presentations at the conferences of the Modern Language Association, the American Studies Association, the American Literature Association, and the Charles Warren Center. In 2005 he was a David Hirsch Memorial Lecturer at Brown University, an invited speaker at the Library of Congress, the Leaves of Grass 150th Anniversary Conference, and the Conference on Whitman and Place at Rutgers University, where he was interviewed for a New York Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS television program "American Originals" (See Quicktime Movie).

Pannapacker's essays have appeared in scholarly books and journals on such topics as the visual representations of Edgar Allan Poe, the life and writings of Walt Whitman, English and American working-class literature, autobiography and biography, the American Civil War, American masculinity, urban studies, and the history of Philadelphia and New York (see publications). He has been a senior consultant in environmental litigation for History Associates, Inc., and, since 1998, he has published a regular column now called "An Academic in America" by "Thomas H. Benton" in the The Chronicle of Higher Education. He also writes the Whitman chapter in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (since 2005) and is a member of the editorial board of The Mickle Street Review.

Currently, Pannapacker is researching a scholarly monograph called Whitman's Cities, writing On Procrastination: A Cultural History (Simon and Schuster, by 2009), and preparing a visual studies monograph called The Legacy of the Rural Cemetery Movement in America. His non-specialist writing (e.g., On Procrastination and the Benton persona) is represented by the Amanda Mecke Agency.
In fall 2000 Pannapacker joined the faculty of the Hope College English Department, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He teaches courses in writing, film, interdisciplinary studies, literary theory, and advanced topics in American literature and culture, including independent studies. In 2003 Pannapacker was appointed a Towsley Research Scholar. He also serves as the campus advisor for the The Newberry Library Program in the Humanities, is long-time member of the Academic Computing Advisory Team, and chairs the college's Academic Affairs Board.

Pannapacker's avocations include book collecting, e-bay, photography, and maintaining a 100-year-old farm named "The Willows." He lives in Olive Township, Michigan, with Teresa Jenkins Pannapacker (B.A., Harvard, 1998) and their three daughters Rebecca, Jessica, and Amanda.