Literary and Cultural Studies | Department of English

Literature teaches us to engage with the past and with others. Whether we are looking at sonnets by Shakespeare, Science Fiction short stories, or novels by Chinua Achebe, Virginia Woolf, or Rigoberto Gonzalez, we are moving across imaginative boundaries: into the past or into the literary culture of a different society. The study of literature makes us aware of our own distinctiveness, as well as the uniqueness of these other places and times.

The study of literature at UNL is varied and cosmopolitan. A UNL literary student might work one semester on Milton or Renaissance London; another on the poetry of contemporary Africa; and then move back to the United States, to read Native American writing or the Harlem Renaissance.

Literary study is a bridge into different imaginative realms; it encourages us to read closely and to read deeply, to lose ourselves in a created world, but then to come back to our current realities with fresh eyes.

Undergraduate Literary and Cultural Studies

Undergraduate students with interests in literature have a variety of opportunities to develop their interests in:

British Literature
American Literature
Ethnic Literatures (including African American, Irish, Chicana(o) American, Asian, Native American, and Jewish American)
World Literatures (including Canadian, African, Caribbean, and European)
Film History, Theory, and Criticism
Literary History
Literary Criticism and Theory
Literary Genres (such as poetry, drama, fiction, life-writing, and environmental literature)

Literature students may also pursue a Literary and Cultural Studies concentration.

UNL students who graduate with an English major in literature pursue a variety of career and professional work, including

Graduate and professional school (including law, graduate study in English, and graduate school in education)
Advertising
Publishing and editing
Teaching

Graduate Literary and Cultural Studies

The Department of English offers formal M.A. and Ph.D. specializations Literary and Cultural Studies. Graduate students who wish to pursue Literary and Cultural Studies have opportunities to work closely with faculty and design individualized programs of study. Graduate Faculty members in Literary and Cultural Studies work on varied scholarly projects, share a commitment to the analysis of literature within larger cultural, social and political contexts, and utilize a wide range of critical methodologies, such as textual recovery, archival work, digital scholarship, and theoretical analyses.

Graduate Specialization

Literary and Cultural Studies Faculty

Laura White

John E. Weaver Professor of English and Coordinator of Literature

19th- and 20th-Century British literature, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, interdisciplinary 19th-century studies, narrative theory, genre theory, history of manners, and Anglo-American modernism

Marco Abel

Willa Cather Professor of English and Film Studies and Department Chair
Courtesy Appointment in Department of Communication Studies

Film studies, critical and literary theory, and contemporary American literature

Stephen Behrendt

George Holmes Distinguished Professor

British Romanticism, later 18th-century British literature, women writers of the Romantic period, literature and the other arts, Blake, the Shelley circle, and creative writing (poetry)

Caterina Bernardini

Lecturer

Nineteenth-century and early modernist American poetry, transnational and world literature, multilingualism, women's writing, reception and translation studies, and digital scholarly editing

James Lowell Brunton

Assistant Professor of Practice and Coordinator of Film Studies

Film and media studies, literary and critical theory, LGBT studies, creative writing, and poetry

Stephen Buhler

Aaron Douglas Professor and Professor of English

The literary culture of Early Modern England, especially the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as literature's connections with philosophy and the performing arts

Peter J. Capuano

Associate Professor and Director of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Program
Faculty Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities
Affiliated Faculty: Women’s and Gender Studies

Victorian literature and culture, Dickens studies (Dickens Project faculty), science and literature, history and theory of the novel, body studies, and digital humanities

Joy Castro

Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies
Director of Institute for Ethnic Studies

Memoir, fiction, film, U.S. ethnic literatures, women's literatures, and modernism

Matt Cohen

Professor and Co-Director of the Walt Whitman Archive

American studies, history of the book, Native American studies, early American literature, editorial theory and practice, and digital archives

Timothy J. Cook

Lecturer

Literary and cultural studies

Kwakiutl Dreher

Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies

African American literature (autobiography and contemporary literature to present), mass-marketed popular literature, film and visual culture

Amanda Gailey

Associate Professor and Digital Humanities Liaison

Digital humanities, text editing and digital archives, editorial theory, and nineteenth-century American literature (especially Whitman, Dickinson, and late nineteenth-century children's literatures)

Tom Gannon

Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies

Native American literatures, British Romantic literature, critical theory, ecocriticism and "animal-rights" theory, avian and animal representation in literature

Scott Guild

Lecturer

Creative writing (fiction), novel writing, composition and rhetoric, literary and cultural studies, and anti-racist pedagogy

Melissa J. Homestead

Professor and Director of the Cather Project

American literature and the history of the book from the Early Republic through the early 20th century (with a focus on women’s authorship), the American novel, Catharine Sedgwick, and Willa Cather

Kathleen Lacey

Academic Advisor and Lecturer

African American literature, multiethnic American literature, women's literature, popular culture, race and medicine, and girlhood studies

Yulia Levchenko

Lecturer

Nineteenth-century Russian and British literature (specifically the Romantic Era), literary translation, and cross-cultural relations between Russia and Europe

Robert Lipscomb

Lecturer

Twentieth and twenty-first century literature and critical theory with an emphasis on queer theory

Tom Lynch

Professor and Place Studies Liaison

Cross-cultural ecocriticism and place-conscious literary studies, with an emphasis on bioregionalism

Kevin McMullen

Research Assistant Professor

Nineteenth-century American literature and culture, periodical literature, digital humanities, editorial theory, and textual recovery

Nick Monk

Director of the Center for Transformative Teaching — Courtesy Appointment in Department of English

Pedagogy, Open-Space Learning, the American West (especially writers Leslie Silko and Cormac McCarthy) and cultural literacy and communication

Amelia María de la Luz Montes

Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies

Chicana and Chicano literature, Latina and Latino literature, LGBT literature, theories of identity, creative writing, fiction, and memoir

Ng'ang'a Muchiri

Assistant Professor

African and African diaspora literature, African digital humanities, 20th-century literature, Caribbean literature

Gabrielle Owen

Assistant Professor

Children's literature and culture, young adult literature, histories of childhood and adolescence, queer theory, and transgender studies

Michael Page

Lecturer, Department Course Scheduler, and Laurus Faculty Advisor

Science fiction, 19th-century British literature and culture, british romanticism, and film studies.

Kenneth M. Price

Hillegass University Professor of American Literature, Co-Director of the Walt Whitman Archive, and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Research in Humanities

19th- and early 20th-century American literature, Walt Whitman, American periodicals, textual scholarship, and digital humanities

Stephen Ramsay

Associate Professor

Digital humanities, theory of new media, and theater history

Guy Reynolds

Professor and Chair of the Undergraduate Program and Curriculum Committee

Willa Cather, modernism, American literary history, post-war fiction, U.S. and anglophone literary internationalism

Beverley Rilett

Lecturer and Research Assistant Professor

Interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, Victorian and early 20th-century British literature and culture, women’s and gender studies, biography, the novel, digital humanities, George Eliot’s life and literature, and digital humanities.

Kari Ronning

Research Associate Professor

Willa Cather Archive; co-director of the Willa Cather Journalism project; quilts, textiles and fashion design

Lauren Rosales

Lecturer

Victorian literature, Neo-Victorianism, detective fiction, the gothic, fanfiction, rhetoric, and popular culture

Gregory E. Rutledge

Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies

African-American literature and culture, including speculative fiction, literary history, the African-American epic aesthetic, and folklore

Julia Schleck

Associate Professor

Global Renaissance studies, Renaissance literature (including drama, lyric poetry and prose), travel writing and early modern colonial writings, interdisciplinary interests include Renaissance music and history of science, genre studies, and cultural materialism/Marxism

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