AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA-LINCOLN
Melissa J. Homestead, Project Director and Faculty. Dr. Homestead is Professor of English, Program Faculty of Women’s and Gender Studies, Director of the Cather Project (a unit in the department of English dedicated to promoting research and teaching on Cather that sponsors that publishes the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and Cather Studies), and co-editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. Her book The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press 2021) draws extensively on Cather’s letters and literary manuscripts. Her other work on Cather has appeared in Studies in American Fiction, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, American Literary Realism, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Scholarly Editing, Studies in the Novel, Cather Studies, Willa Cather Review, and Something Complete and Great: The Centennial Study of My Ántonia. Beyond Cather, Homestead has also published widely on American women’s writing from the late 1700s through the early 1900s, with a focus on authorship and publishing history. In addition to directing the institute, Homestead will co-lead sessions on Cather’s letters and the nature of archives and lead a session on Cather’s creative process.
Emily J. Rau, Project Associate Director and Faculty. Dr. Rau is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the University Libraries, the director of the Willa Cather Archive, and a fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Rau also serves as one of the project leads of the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, a cross-institutional collaborative project using digital humanities tools and methodologies to recover the work of American women writers. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln while serving as Managing Editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. Her dissertation, "Jumping the Tracks: The Railroad in American Literature," explored the intervention of the transcontinental railroad in American literature as it impacted and transformed conceptions of space, place, race, class, identity, and community. Her work on Cather has appeared in the Willa Cather Review and In the Country of Lost Borders: New Critical Essays on My Ántonia. She will co-lead sessions on Cather and digital research methods.
Andrew Jewell, Project Faculty. Dr. Jewell is Professor in University Libraries, the Chair of Digital Strategies and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and was the director of the Willa Cather Archive from 2005-2022. He served as Interim Coordinator and, later, Interim Chair of Archives & Special Collections in the University Libraries from 2019-2023. He has published several essays on Willa Cather and other American writers, scholarly editing, and digital humanities. He is co-editor of the books The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Knopf 2013), and is co-editor of the digital, scholarly edition The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, which began publication in January 2018. He is currently at work on a new biography of Willa Cather. Jewell will co-lead sessions on Cather’s letters and the nature of archives.
Margaret D. Jacobs, Project Faculty. Dr. Jacobs is the Charles Mach Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies. She is of settler background and collaborates with Rosebud Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk on Reconciliation Rising (reconciliationrising.org), a multimedia project that showcases Indigenous people and settlers who are working together to honestly confront painful and traumatic histories, promote meaningful and respectful dialogue between Natives and non-Natives, and create pathways to reconciliation. Jacobs is also the co-founder and co-director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project at UNL. She has published more than 35 articles and 4 books, primarily about Indigenous child removal and family separation. She published After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands with Princeton University Press in 2021. Jacobs will co-lead a seminar on the Pawnee history of south-central Nebraska in Walter Echo-Hawk’s Sea of Grass, drawing on her recent work on reconciliation.
Traci Robison, Academic Project Staff. Ms. Robison, Outreach Archivist and assistant professor of practice in Archives and Special Collections, has been an archives professional at UNL for nearly seventeen years. Encompassing both behind-the-scenes and forward-facing archival work, her experience includes teaching, reference, public outreach, exhibits research and design, archival processing, digitization, and metadata creation. In collaboration with other faculty, Robison has planned and provided primary source instructional sessions utilizing University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Willa Cather collections. Ms. Robison will be responsible for consulting with participants about collections and coordinating the retrieval of materials.
Beth Burke, Administrative Project Staff. As Cather Project Specialist at UNL, Ms. Burke has over twenty years of experience organizing Cather events, arranging for visiting scholars, editing, writing, and researching in support of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and Cather Studies, and processing archival materials. For the institute, she will be responsible for travel arrangements, logistics, financial records and processing, document design, and communications.
AT THE NATIONAL WILLA CATHER CENTER
Tracy Tucker, Director of Collections and Curation. Ms. Tucker earned a B.A. in English from Kansas State University, an M.A. in English and Great Plains Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and certification as an archivist from the Society of American Archivists. At the NWCC, she is responsible for its museum and archival collections and interpretation of the NWCC’s sites and holdings. She will co-lead a session on the educational and interpretive work of the NWCC and will also be responsible for participants’ archival research time and for a presentation and tour of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie.
Rachel Olsen, Director of Education and Engagement. A former community college English professor, Ms. Olsen holds a B.A. in English from Missouri State University and an M.A. in English from Kansas State University. At the NWCC, she is responsible for educational programming and outreach and supervises the tour guide program. She will co-lead a session on the educational and interpretive work of the NWCC, will coordinate and supervise participant tours of Red Cloud town sites, and will lead the tour of country sites.
PARTICIPATING SCHOLARS
Walter Echo-Hawk. Mr. Echo-Hawk is an attorney, author, and President of the Pawnee Nation Business Council. He is the author of The Sea of Grass: A Family Tale from the American Heartland (Fulcrum 2018); In The Light Of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America and the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Fulcrum 2013); In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided (Fulcrum 2010); and Battlefields and Burial Grounds: The Indian Struggle to Protect Ancestral Graves in the United States (Lerner 1994). Echo-Hawk will lead a seminar on the Pawnee history of south-central Nebraska in his novel The Sea of Grass.
Evelyn Funda. Dr. Funda is an emeritus faculty member and administrator from Utah State University. She earned her Ph.D. from University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005 under the direction of Susan J. Rosowski, writing a dissertation applying performance theory to Cather’s use of oral storytelling methods. Her essays on Cather have appeared in Cather Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative, Religion and Literature, Willa Cather Review, and Western American Literature. For the past fifteen years she has been researching Cather’s interest in Czech people and culture and is completing a book Willa Cather and the Czechs. Funda is also author of an award-winning cultural memoir about her own Czech family’s history, Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament (University of Nebraska Press 2013), and co-editor of the textbook Farm: A Multimodal Reader (Utah State University Press), now in its third edition. Funda will lead a seminar on Cather’s engagement with Nebraska Czech immigrants in her life and fiction.
Gabi Kirilloff. Dr. Kirilloff is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches courses in digital humanities, nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature, and women’s literature. Kirilloff is the author of several book chapters and articles on Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, as well as on gender and character agency in the works of women writers. Her work has been published in journals including College Literature, Cultural Analytics, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Kirilloff's book project, Keeping the Reader Close, employs computational analysis alongside close reading to examine reader address in a corpus of over 3,000 nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone novels. While completing her Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she served as the co-coordinator for the Nebraska Literary Lab and as an editorial assistant on both the Willa Cather Archive and the Walt Whitman Archive. Kirilloff will co-lead sessions on Cather and digital research methods. on Cather and digital research methods.
Jennifer Ladino. Dr. Ladino is a professor of English and core faculty in Environmental Science at the University of Idaho, as well as co-founder and co-director of the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab. Her expertise is in public memory, climate change fiction, emotion/affect studies, and literature of the U.S. West. She is the author of Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (University of Nevada Press 2019) and Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (University of Virginia Press 2012) and co-editor, with Kyle Bladow, of Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (University of Nebraska Press 2018). Ladino will lead a seminar on place and nostalgia in O Pioneers! and a workshop on the affective dimensions of the Homestead National Historical Park.
Susan Naramore Maher. Dr. Maher is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. She specializes in Western American and Canadian literature, ecocriticism, nonfiction writing, and long nineteenth-century British literature. She has served as president of the Willa Cather Foundation and the Western Literature Association. She is author of the genre-defining study Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) and co-editor of several essay collections focusing on place and ecocriticism. She has published widely on contemporary writers from Canada and the United States, with a particular emphasis on Great Plains ecology, reconciliation movements, Willa Cather, and landscape nonfiction. She is currently at work on Authoring Landscapes: Literary Pilgrimage in the North American Interior, which will include Cather. Maher will lead a seminar on ecocritical approaches to place in Cather’s works.
Mark W. Van Wienen. Dr. Van Wienen is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge University Press 1997) and American Socialist Triptych: The Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois (University of Michigan Press 2012), the latter supported by a year-long NEH fellowship, and editor of Rendezvous with Death: American Poems of the Great War (University of Illinois P, 2002), American Literature in Transition, 1910–1920 (Cambridge University Press 2018), and American Literature and Culture of the First World War (co-edited with Tim Dayton, Cambridge University Press 2021). Van Wienen’s essays have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Modern Fiction Studies. His current book project is “Law of Thyself Complete”: American Literature and Labor in the Rail World. Van Wienen will lead a seminar on the railroad as a key force in shaping place in Cather’s fiction and will be a member of the selection committee.