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The Department of English seeks to provide for the diverse needs of its students by offering them the opportunity to read widely, to understand and enjoy what they read, and to express themselves both orally and in writing with ease, force and clarity. Through the practice of writing and the study of language and literature, the department strives to stimulate humanistic learning and the capacity to respond rationally and imaginatively to literature and the life it reflects.

Breaking News

2013 Literary Contest Winners Announced

The English Department is pleased to announce the winners of the 2013 Literary Contests.  Winners will read from their work on Tuesday, April 23 at 3:00 p.m. in the Dudley Bailey Library in Andrews Hall.  Winners will be honored at the English Department Awards Ceremony on Thursday, April 25 at 2:00 p.m. at the Bailey.

News

Kwame Dawes Interviewed by NPR's All Things Considered

Kwame Dawes was interviewed by NPR's All Things Considered in Jamaica Does Literary Fest With A Caribbean Twist.

Jobs

Check back next Fall.

Photos

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View more of the faces of the English Department on our Facebook Fan Page and while you are there say that you like us to get updates on what is going on in the Department.

Listen to Ted Kooser reading "So This Is Nebraska"

Digital Humanities

Frame by Frame

Jonis Agee

Laura White

Recent Books Published by Department Faculty

Special Projects

• Humanities on the Edge
• The Dickens Project
• Walt Whitman Archive
• Willa Cather Archive
• Nebraska Writing Project
• Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

Humanities on the Edge

Watch the "trailer" for "Humanities on the Edge" here.

Inaugurated in fall 2010 and co-organized by Dr. Marco Abel and Dr. Roland Végsö, "Humanities on the Edge" is a cross-disciplinary speaker series focusing on theoretical research in the Humanities. Each year the series features a special topic. For 2010/11, it was the "Political Turn" in the Humanities; for 2011/12 it was "Biopower/Biopolitics;" and for 2012-13 it is “Aesthetics/Performance/Politics.”

During its inaugural year, the series featured four speakers: Steven Shaviro (Wayne State U), who talked about his current work on Eastern European Cinema and argued that it might help us envision political alternatives to the capitalist status quo; Jeffrey Nealon (Penn State), who discussed the role literature might play as a tool for living in the age of "just-in-time capitalism"; Sande Cohen (California Institute for the Arts), who addressed the vexed issue of the role criticism plays in what he calls "the Age of Anti-Intellectualism"; and the world-renowned Argentine political theorist, Ernesto Laclau, lectured on "The Discursive Construction of Social Antagonisms.

In the fall 2011, Sara Guyer (U Wisconsin) presented John Clare's Grave and the politics of life; and Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) provided an incisive critique of social media and its relation to the discourse of democracy in the age of communicative capitalism. In the spring 2012, Michael Hardt (Duke) discussed the cycle of struggles of 2011 (the encampments and occupations) as manifesting a refusal and inversions of the very subjectivities that the ongoing economic and financial crisis produces; and Cesare Casarino (U Minnesota) discussed the need for a "Universality of the Common" as a strategy for imagining and producing a non-capitalist future.

In the fall of 2012, Mark Greif (Professor of Literary Studies, New School University), discussed the role aesthetic production plays for the status of reality in the age of Realty TV, and Lutz Koepnick (Professor of German, Film and Media Studies, and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis) turned to Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams about the famous Chauvet Caves in Southern France in order to reflect on contemporary media aesthetic and the politics of time. In the spring of 2013, E. Patrick Johnson (Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies, Northwestern University) gave a lecture entitled “Going Home Ain’t Always Easy: Performance and Ethics in the Black Gay South,” which included a performance based on his book Sweat Tea; and in her lecture “Communal Luxury,” Kristin Ross (Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University) revisited the Artists’ Manifesto proclaimed during the 1871 Paris Commune as a means to reexamine ideas developed by the Communards regarding education and the status of the artist from the perspective of our own moment, a context that includes the contemporary assault on higher education as well as the world-wide uprisings of 2011.

The Dickens Project

The Dickens Project is an important consortium for research on Charles Dickens and nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies centered at the University of California. With its official membership in the consortium, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln joins some of the finest institutions in the country including Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Vanderbilt, and NYU along with fellow Big Ten and CIC members Indiana, Penn State, Iowa, and Ohio State. The Project sponsors an annual Research Institute and collaborative symposium in early August on the Santa Cruz campus, a graduate conference on nineteenth-century British literature and culture held on another consortium campus each spring, occasional international conferences, as well as other institutes, colloquia, and lectures throughout the year. Through their participation in these conferences, UNL graduate students have the unique opportunity to meet and develop collegial relations with Victorianists from a wide range of research-intensive universities.

Walt Whitman Archive

The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents. He left behind an enormous amount of written material, and his major life work, Leaves of Grass, went through six very different editions, each of which was issued in a number of formats, creating a book that is probably best studied as numerous distinct creations rather than as a single revised work. His many notebooks, manuscript fragments, prose essays, letters, and voluminous journalistic articles all offer key cultural and biographical contexts for his poetry. The Archive sets out to incorporate as much of this material as possible, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world. The Archive is directed by Kenneth M. Price (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Ed Folsom (University of Iowa).

Willa Cather Archive

The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a partnership between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska. More...

Nebraska Writing Project

The Nebraska Writing Project (NEWP) is a network of professional educators and affiliated writers that provides opportunities to improve, enhance and celebrate writing for classrooms and communities across Nebraska.

NEWP believes that:

• The best teachers of writing are writers themselves.
• Teachers provide the best instruction for other teachers.
• Anyone, no matter their ability level, can improve their writing in a supportive context with other practicing writers.
• True school reform comes through democratic partnerships across grade levels.
• Teachers, students and communities benefit when teachers form networks with other teachers and draw on collective expertise.

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) is a joint initiative of the University Libraries and the College of Arts & Sciences.

The Center advances interdisciplinary research in the humanities by creating unique digital content, developing tools to assist scholars in text analysis and visualization, and encouraging the use (and refinement) of international standards for humanities computing. CDRH offers forums, workshops, and research fellowships for faculty and students in the area of digital scholarship.

Though the primary responsibility of the Center is to work with humanists, the CDRH will provide advice to faculty in the social sciences and sciences engaged in interdisciplinary projects that may cross over into the humanities.