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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

News

Trey Moody Wins Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry

Congratulations to Trey Moody, who has won the 2012 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, the annual poetry prize held by Sarabande Books, for his first full-length poetry manuscript, Thought That Nature.  The manuscript was chosen by judge Cole Swensen.  The prize includes a $2,000 cash award and publication of a full-length collection of poetry. 

Moody is from San Antonio and earned a BA and an MFA from Texas State University. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently, How We Remake the World, co-written with Joshua Ware and winner of the Slope Editions Chapbook Prize. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2009, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, and Washington Square. Currently a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska, he lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter and curates The Clean Part Reading Series with Jeff Alessandrelli.

UNL Professor Kwame Dawes Announces New African Poetry Book Series

Kwame Dawes, Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, is excited to announce the establishment of the African Poetry Book Series. Beginning in January 2014, the imprint will publish four new titles by African poets each year. In addition the Series will publish every few years an anthology representing African regions, themes and ideas. Of the four books published annually, one will be a winner of the Sillerman African First Book Prize for African Poets, and another will be a new and selected volume by a major African poet. The winner of the prize will also receive a $1000 cash prize and publication with the University of Nebraska Press and Amalion Press in Senegal. Complete Press Release.

Prairie Schooner launches second edition of arts and literature series Fusion

Prairie Schooner is excited to announce its next release of the new arts and literature series Fusion. A fresh online series featuring collaborations between Prairie Schooner and interesting, innovative online literary entities and individuals from around the world, Fusion seeks to create dynamic fusions in literature and art. Fusion #1 featured a collaboration with Cordite Poetry Review focusing on work. Fusion #2 continues the themed trend by focusing on womb, while featuring a partnership with Batswana poets and artists. More...

Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize

James Crews was recently named the winner of a 2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize in the amount of $10,000—one of the top prizes given for that year. The grant will help with travel and research as he completes his second book of poetry. These prizes were established by Marvin Rosenberg in memory of his late wife, Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg, and the intent is to encourage the work of younger poets. Several prizes varying from $1,000 up to as much as $25,000 are awarded each year (for a total of around $200,000) for the finest lyric poems celebrating the spirit of life. The competition is open to any writer (and any UNL student for faculty member) under the age of 40 on November 6, 2012. All poets, published or unpublished, are welcome to enter, but only previously unpublished poems are eligible for the competition.

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.

Prairie Schooner to be Available on Kindle

Following fresh online efforts such as the launch of the podcast series Air Schooner and of the cross-cultural e-zine FUSION, the University of Nebraska’s internationally- recognized literary journal, Prairie Schooner, will continue its innovative trend by making its print issues available on Kindle starting with its Summer 2012 issue, which mails out mid-June. More...

Nebraska Arts Council Awards

Congratulations to Timothy Schaffert and Judy Slater for being selected to receive awards from the Nebraska Arts Council!  Timothy received a $5,000 Distinguished Artist Fellowship in fiction and Judy a $2,000 Merit Award in fiction. 

2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize winners announced: $6,000 awarded

Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has announced the winners for its annual awards for books of short fiction and poetry. Judges for poetry were Hilda Raz, Peggy Shumaker, and David St. John. The judges for fiction were Sherman Alexie and Colin Channer. The winners were chosen from more than 1,100 submissions from around the world. More...

Melissa Homestead Receives Honorable Mention by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers for its  first Edition Award

An edition of Catharine Sedgwick's novel Clarence, co-edited by English department faculty member Melissa J. Homestead, has been awarded an Honorable Mention by the Society for the Study of American Women Writers for its  first Edition Award. The SSAWW Edition Award is given every three years at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers’ conference to recognize excellence in the recovery of American women writers. First published in 1830, Sedgwick's novel of manners is set in New York City in the 1820s. Co-edited by Homestead and Ellen A. Foster (Clarion University of Pennsylvania) and published by Broadview Press, the edition features an introduction authored by Homestead focusing on Sedgwick's place in transatlantic literary culture and her imaginative engagements with New York City and the Caribbean, as well as a selection of contextual documents and images.

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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.

Our 2012/13 speakers are, in the fall, Mark Greif (Professor of Literary Studies, New School University), who 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 WashingtonUniversity in St. Louis), who will turn 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; and in the spring, E. Patrick Johnson (Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies, Northwestern University) and Kristin Ross (Professor of Comparative Literature, New York University) will come to UNL as “Humanities on the Edge” speakers.

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.