Marco Abel contributed a text to the program catalogue of the moving history film festival in Potsdam, Germany, September 25-29. In its second iteration, the festival focused on German films engaging the events of 1989 (fall of the wall) and 1990 (unification of East- and West-Germany). Marco’s essay discusses Dominik Graf’s feature-length film, Die Verflechtung (1993), the second of four episodes of the short-lived German TV series, Morlock. Marco also interviewed the filmmaker in a post-screening Q&A on stage on September 25.

Grace Bauer’s poems “The Golden Rule of Water” and “For James Booker on St. Patrick’s Eve” appeared in the anthology Maple Leaf Rag VII. “The Nothing That Is” appeared in The Atlanta Review’s 25th Anniversary Anthology. “Color Coded” and “Imaginary Paintings” appeared in the latest issue of Oakwood.

Steve Behrendt’s illustrated essay on material culture responses to the notorious and deadly “Manchester Massacre” (or “Peterloo") of 16 August 1819 appears as the lead essay in Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making during the Romantic Era edited by MIchael Demson and Regina Hewitt and published by Edinburgh UP. Steve’s essay is called “Peterloo, Ambivalence and Commemorative Culture.”

Steve Buhler ’s essay, “Falstaff and the Constructions of Musical Nostalgia,” appears in The Routledge Guide to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, edited by Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is thrilled to hear that her videoart piece, Untitled #2, has been selected along with filmmakers such as Su Freidrich and other artists for a traveling interdisciplinary art project, Then, What If? (curated by Professors Gene Kort and Ken Steen, University of Hartford). It premieres at The Five Points Center for the Visual Arts in Torrington, CT, Oct 29 – Nov 30, 2019. Foster’s short Dada film Run / Fall is an official selection at the Save the Archives Film Festival at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Fine Arts Cinema, September 28 – 29. Two of her dadaist films, Kiki’s Film and Dada Ship, screened at the Vast Lab International Experimental Film Festival in LA, September 20 - 21, 2019. Dada Ship is also an official selection at the Austin Arthouse Film Festival in Austin, Texas on October 6th.

Foster recently published a number of book reviews in Choice, including: “Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture,” by Jeff Menne; “Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies,” by Steven Cohan; “Ridley Scott: A Biography,” by Vincent LoBrutto; and “Italian Ecocinema: Beyond the Human,” by Elena Past. Foster’s experimental Super 8mm short film, No Personal Checks, will screen at Analogica Film Festival, a prestigious traveling film festival of small gauge films premiering in Bolzano, Italy on December 4 – 8. Analogica 9 will play around the world in 2019 and 2020.

In August, Broadview Press published Department of English professor Kelly Stage’s new edition of The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker. The 17th century comedy revels in the exploits of a rebellious early modern woman, based on the real-life Mary Frith (alias Moll Cutpurse), who liked to cross-dress and generally upset polite society, as she winds her way through the city of London. Stage’s edition offers a newly regularized and annotated main text, along with an edited, annotated, and curated set of contextual readings.

Arden Eli Hill has had work accepted by Trans Bodies Trans Selves’ second edition, an anthology from Oxford University Press.

Ken Price co-authored with Stephanie Browner “The Need for Hybridity in the Editing of Charles Chesnutt," for International Journal of Digital Humanities.

Erika Luckert’s essay “Onomatopoeia for the Sound of a Gun” was published in Pidgeonholes.

Alexander Ramirez has fiction and nonfiction pieces forthcoming in the pages of Image Journal and Isthmus, respectively.

Cameron Steele’s essay “Vortex” was published this summer in SFWP Quarterly’s special abortion ban protest issue.

David Winter’s poem “Snow” appeared in Cotton Xenomorph.

On September 10, Marco Abel gave a précis of his work-in-progress at the American Academy in Berlin as part of their public presentation of the 11 fellows who are recipients of the Academy’s Berlin Prize. To Marco’s delight, legendary German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, a trustee of the Academy and director of classics such as the Academy Award-winner, The Tin Drum (1979), was in the audience.

Tom Lynch presented a paper in June at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Conference in Davis, CA. The paper was titled “Unsettling National Parks and Nature Reserves: The Case of Uluru/Kata Tjuta National Park and the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area.” It was part of a two-panel series on settler colonial ecocriticism that he organized, and that may evolve into a book on that topic based on the papers presented at the conference.

Tom also presented a paper at the Western Literature Association Conference in September, held at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, CO. The paper was titled “"Embodied Presence and Literary Analysis: The West and the Outback.” It was part of a panel titled “Storytelling Scholars” on the use of personal narrative in scholarly work.

In connection with the 200th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s birth, Ken Price recently gave talks in Boston, New York City, Iowa City, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In the next six weeks he’ll travel further afield to lecture in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Beijing, and Lisbon.

On Tuesday, September 17, Linda Garcia Merchant was invited to do a virtual guest lecture at the University of Houston for an undergraduate seminar course, entitled Archives and Digital Humanities. Garcia Merchant’s talk, “Intergenerational Praxis” addressed the work of both her ten-year oral history project, the Chicana Por Mi Raza Digital Memory Collective and her own research site, Chicana Diasporic: A Nomadic Journey of the Activist Exiled,” along with reflections on her work and teaching as a Latinx Digital Humanist.

Emily Rau recently received a fellowship to participate in a symposium entitled “Railroads in Native America: Reflections on the 150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Construction.” This symposium brought together scholars, activists, artists, tribal members, and railroad employees to specifically address the significant impact of the transcontinental railroad on Native Nations. It was a collaboration between the Union Pacific Railroad Museum, the National Parks Service, and the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Flatwater Shakespeare’s 2019 fall production is Macbeth, directed by company founder Bob Hall and starring Matthew Lukasiewicz (a brilliant Hamlet in 2015). The performances continue October 3-6 and 10-13 in the Stables at Wyuka, 3600 “O” Street, Lincoln. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. Steve Buhler serves as dramaturg and also appears as the Thane of Ross. Tickets available now.

The new Medical Humanities curriculum at the University Med Center and UNO is to be called The Ted Kooser Health Humanities Center. Since his successful treatment for cancer at the Med Center twenty years ago, Ted has been active in promoting the inclusion of the arts and humanities in medical education on both campuses, and this new initiative brings the two campuses together in partnership. There is now a major with, currently, 103 Medical Humanities minors. Ted is an artist-in-residence in the program and has an appointment as a visiting member of the faculty.

Ken Price reports that the Walt Whitman Archive recently received another grant of $107,000 from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to continue work on “Fame and Infamy: Walt Whitman’s Old Age Correspondence.” The entire Whitman Archive team deserves credit for this development.

Katie Schmid Henson’s manuscript of poems eat the dream was a finalist for the 2019 Akron Poetry Prize.