Members of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers may be interested in Willa Cather: Place and Archive, a two-week NEH Institute for Higher Education Faculty from 16 July to 28 July 2023, directed by Melissa J. Homestead, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and director of the Cather Project.

Twenty-five participants will explore place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather. At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, participants will have access to unparalleled archival holdings of Cather materials and the expertise of a leading center for digital humanities. At the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, they will experience landscapes and buildings represented in Cather’s fiction that function as a kind of archive. The institute will take a critical approach to all three kinds of archives (special collections, digital resources, and place), considering how they are mediated and what is absent. Cather’s fiction celebrated the achievements of recent European immigrants who settled on the Great Plains but ignored the then-recent forced relocations of indigenous people to make way for settlement. Both the European immigrant presence and absence of the Pawnee will receive particular attention. In addition to Homestead, scholars from UNL leading sessions will be Andrew Jewell, Emily Rau, and Margaret Jacobs. Participating scholars from outside UNL leading sessions include Walter Echo-Hawk, Jennifer Ladino, Susan Naramore Maher, Eveylyn Funda, Mark Van Wienen, and Gabi Kirilloff.

For more information, including how to apply, visit cather-institute.unl.edu. Applications are due 3 March 2023.