Melissa J. Homestead

Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

• Smith College, A.B. 1985 (magna cum laude with high honors in English)
• University of Pennsylvania, A.M. 1987
• University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. 1998

Professional Areas of Specialty

American Literature and the History of the Book from the Early Republic through the early 20^th century, with a focus on women’s authorship

Courses regularly taught

American Literature Survey, The World of Willa Cather, Introduction to Women’s Literature, Survey of Women’s Literature, Introduction to English Studies, Short Story, Early American Novel, Graduate Seminars on Women Writers (Women in Print; Willa Cather)

Professional Activities

• Coordinator of Assessment, English Department

Selected publications

• American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005 (pbk 2010) (chapters on Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Jane Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune).
• With Ellen Foster, co-editor Clarence; or, a Tale of Our Times (1830) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2011. Honorable Mention, Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award, 2012.
• With Guy Reynolds, co-editor Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. Cather Studies 9. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011.
• With Pamela T. Washington, co-editor, E.D.E.N. Southworth: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Popular Novelist. U of Tennessee P, December 2012.
• “Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the Historiography of Lesbian Sexuality,” forthcoming in Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century (Cather Studies 10).
•  “From Periodical to Book in her Early Career: E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Letters to Abraham Hart.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 29.1 (2012): 115-47.
• “The Shape of Catharine Sedgwick’s Career.” Cambridge History of American Women’s Literature. Ed. Dale Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 185-203.
• “Edith Lewis as Editor: Every Week Magazine and the Contexts of Cather’s Fiction.” Willa Cather: A Writer’s Worlds. Cather Studies 8. Ed Robert Thacker and John Murphy. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2010. 325-52.
• With Camryn Hansen, "Susanna Rowson’s Transatlantic Career.”Early American Literature 45.3 (2010): 619-54.
• “Middlebrow Readers and Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand, and the Popular Fiction Market.” Crisscrossing Borders in the Literature of the American West. Ed. Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009. 75-94. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/78/
• With Anne L. Kaufman. "Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis’s Creative Partnership." Western American Literature 43.1 (2008): 41-69. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/77/
• “The Beginnings of the American Novel.” Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, ed. Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 527-46. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/79/
• Introduction, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. New York: Signet Classics, 2007.
• "The Publishing History of Augusta Jane Evans's Confederate Novel Macaria: Unwriting Some Lost Cause Myths." Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures  28.3-4 (2005): 665-702. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/73/
• "When I Can Read My Title Clear: Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Stowe v. Thomas Copyright Infringement Case." Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 27 (2002): 201-45. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/45/  (a revised and expanded version appears my book)
•  “Behind the Veil: Sedgwick and Anonymous Publication.” Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements. Boston: Northeastern UP, 2002. 19?35.
• "'Every Body Sees the Theft': Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in Antebellum America." New England Quarterly 74 (2001): 210-37. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/51/  (a revised and expanded version appears in my book)
• “‘Links of Similitude’: The Narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Author-Reader Relations at the End of the Nineteenth Century. Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999. 76-98. available at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/74/
• A Digital Edition of Every Week Magazine (1915-1918). Pilot site accessible at http://everyweek.unl.edu

In progress:

• A Digital Edition of Every Week Magazine (1915-1918). Pilot site accessible at http://everyweek.unl.edu