The University of Nebraska English Department has had a long-standing commitment to Great Plains studies. For decades, we have taught a variety of courses on Great Plains literature and culture.
The Place Studies program encompasses all major areas of our department: creative writing, composition and rhetoric, digital humanities, and literary and cultural studies. Find out what our faculty, students, and alumni are accomplishing within the field, and explore what Place Studies in the English department at UNL has to offer current and prospective students.
A human community, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Wendell BerryThe Work of Local Culture
Our department was instrumental in the foundation of The Center for Great Plains Studies, the Plains Humanities Alliance, the Nebraska Writing Project and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In addition, we serve as the home for the Cather Project and the journal Western American Literature. Building on that foundation, and inspired by innovations in ecocriticism and place-conscious pedagogy, in recent years we have expanded our focus to include place-conscious and ecocritical approaches to the literature of many other regions of the world, from Ireland to Africa, India to Australia.
Our faculty and graduate students work in a wide variety of areas, including ecocriticism, ecopoetics, rural education, ecocomposition, postcolonial and settler-colonial studies, bioregionalism, Great Plains studies, Native American studies, Chicano/Latino studies, Afro-Carribean studies, digital humanities, Cather Studies, the Nebraska Writing Project, spatial studies, animal (and plant) studies, and Medieval/Renaissance studies.
The most important function of literature today is to redirect human consciousness to a full consideration of its place in a threatened natural world. Glen Love"Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism"
We provide many opportunities for students to enhance their Place Studies curriculum through participation in the Great Plains Studies certificate, the Nebraska Writing Project, and other campus-based organizations that can be found on our resources page. Moreover, the city of Lincoln and its surrounding environs offer much in the way of recreation and local, environmental engagement for students.
Tom Lynch
Professor and Place Studies Liaison
Cross-cultural ecocriticism and place-conscious literary studies, with an emphasis on bioregionalism
Rachel Azima
Associate Professor of Practice and Writing Center Director
Writing center studies, writing across the curriculum, teaching of writing, faculty development, and ecocriticism and place-conscious pedagogy
Robert Brooke
John E. Weaver Professor
Composition and rhetoric, critical theory, english education, rural education, and creative nonfiction
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
Kwame Dawes
Chancellor's Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner
Post-colonial literature and theory, African American literature, Caribbean literature, African literature, reggae aesthetics, poetry, and playwriting
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
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
Matt Whitaker
Lecturer
Composition and rhetoric, Great Plains studies, critical geography, spatial theory, ecocriticism, animal studies, and material rhetorics