Welcome
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.
Department of English
202 Andrews Hall
Lincoln NE 68588-0333
402-472-3191
402-472-9771 (fax)
Breaking News
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 All poets, published or unpublished, are welcome to enter, but only previously unpublished poems are eligible for the competition.
Laurus 2012 now available!

The 2012 issue of Laurus, the undergraduate literary magazine, was launched on April 19. The issue features poetry, fiction, essays, and visual artwork from 40 UNL undergrads. Much of this year's artwork has been published in color. Issues are available for purchase on the first floor of Andrews Hall during dead week, at Professor Michael Page's office, Andrews 300, or in the main office on the second floor.
Dawes selected for Guggenheim Fellowship
Kwame Dawes, professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He is among 181 scholars, artists and scientists in the United States and Canada who were selected for the honor from nearly 3,000 applicants. Read the complete story at Today@UNL.
Student Leadership Awards
The following two English majors were recognized at the Outstanding Student Leadership Award banquet:
Kathleen (Katie) Oltman
Finalist, 2012 Outstanding Student Leadership Award
Micah Wullschleger
Award winner, 2012 Outstanding Student Leadership Award
Literary Contest Winners
2012 English Department Literary Contest Winners Announced. There will be a Reading by the winners in the Bailey Library at 3:00 p.m. on April 25. A list of the winners is available here.
Julia Schleck
The Medieval and Renaissance Studies program congratulates Julia Schleck, our interim director, who received a three month fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is the second fellowship Professor Schleck has won this year! Read more.
Scholarly Editing
Amanda Gailey and Andrew Jewell announce the debut of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, now online at scholarlyediting.org. Published for over 30 years as a print publication titled Documentary Editing, Scholarly Editing continues to publish articles about the theory and practice of editing and reviews of new editions. In addition to this material, Scholarly Editing offers new, innovative content: the journal is among the first--if not the first--to publish peer-reviewed editions of primary source materials of cultural significance. Scholarly Editing presents editors with a rigorously peer-reviewed publication platform and also shares fascinating documents from cultural history with the reading public.
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.
Seanna Oakley
Congratulations to Professor Seanna Oakley who has received a 2012 College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award!
News
A History of Horror
Wheeler Winston Dixon's book A History of Horror (Rutgers UP) has been
chosen by Choice, the ALA Library Journal, as an Outstanding Academic
Book of the Year for 2011.
Michael Page
Michael Page's book, The Literary Imagination from Erasmus Darwin to H.G. Wells: Science, Evolution, Ecology, will be released on March 21 from Ashgate Publishing.
Guy Reynolds
Guy Reynolds was quoted in an article titled "Which Gatsby is the greatest? Plays go head-to-head in roaring Twenties row" in The Independent. Read the article and his quote here.
Kwame Dawes
The nation's largest nonprofit organization serving creative writers is recognizing Kwame Dawes, professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner.
New York-based Poets & Writers has named Dawes as a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award. Read more.
Julia Schleck
Julia Schleck was awarded a $6,000 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, to support research on her new book in the London archives this summer.
Joy Castro's Hell or High Water
Joy Castro's forthcoming debut novel, Hell or High Water, has been chosen as the September 2012 Book of the Month by the Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club.
Alumni News
- Cara Morgenson has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Poland.
- John Duncan Talbird (Ph.D. 2004) is associate professor of English at Queensborough Community College-CUNY where he is assistant director of the writing program and co-coordinator of WID/WAC.
- Ian Olney was enrolled in the English doctoral program at UNL from 1998 to 2003 and pursued a course of study focusing on film.
- Karen Head earned her Ph.D. in English from UNL in 2004. Now an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, she is also the Director of GT's new state-of-the-art Communication Center.
- Xaviera Flores is the Project Archivist for the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Grant project "Labor Rights are Civil Rights/Los Derechos de Trabajo son Derechos Civiles" at Arizona State University Libraries' Archives and Special Collections.
- On February 7, 2012, UNL alum emily m. danforth's debut novel—The Miseducation of Cameron Post—will be published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
- Vanessa Steinroetter received her Ph.D. in English from UNL in May of 2011. She started her position as an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University in Topeka, KS, in August, 2011, after spending four weeks as a Caleb Loring, Jr. fellow at the Boston Athenæum over the summer.
- Frank Wheeler received his MA in English from UNL in May of 2010.
- Sarah Knight graduated with a B.A. in English in 2009. In May 2012, she will complete a master's degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- Ryan Wiegert attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln from 1999-2004 and graduated with a B.A. in English.
- Derek Driedger (Ph.D. 2007) received the Dakota Wesleyan University Faculty Professional Excellence Award for the 2010-2011 school year.
- On August 2, 2011, Dave Madden's book, The Authentic Animal, will be available in bookstores.
- Faculty Faces at Hendrix College has featured Tyrone Jaeger in a recent article on their website.
- Jennifer Sinor earned her BA in English and Russian from UNL in 1991.
Alumni Information
Heard anything new or exciting about fellow alumni?
If you have any alumni news or information to be passed along and
shared, please, send an e-mail to .
Jobs
Assistant Professor of English
The English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is seeking a specialist in fiction writing, for a tenure-track appointment at the assistant professor level.
Assistant Professor - Digital Humanities
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) announces a cluster hire in digital humanities: over the next three years the university intends to hire six tenure-line faculty members across a number of departments (and additional staff) to further propel this signature program.
Photos
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Watch Robert Brooke's ENG 376 student, Sara Schroeder, win $50 of the dean's money!
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More Photos
View more of the faces of the English Department on our Facebook Fan Page and while you are there say that you like us to get updates on what is going on in the Department.
Listen to Ted Kooser reading "So This Is Nebraska"
To listen to Ted Kooser reading "So This Is Nebraska" Javascript will need to enabled for your browser and/or the latest Flash player will need to be installed. Click here to download the latest Flash player.
The transcript of this video follows.
Transcript
I wrote this poem Bill Kloefkorn, the state poet was one his way out to Grand Island [Nebraska] one time for a writing engagement out there. And I was sort of resentful that I hadn't been invited. And I thought I'd go home and write a real snotty poem about Nebraska, and have Bill read it out there in my absence. And I got home and I started to work on the poem. And I as the poem developed, I began to understand how much I really loved the state. This is that poem. Read So This is Nebraska.
Video by Wessels Living History Farm.
Digital Humanities
Center for Digital Research Humanities
View a video introduction to the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
Frame by Frame
Frame by Frame
"Frame By Frame" is a series of academic movie reviews by Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In this episode, Dr. Dixon focuses on Special Effects Masters.
Jonis Agee
Laura White
Laura White
View a video of English professor Laura White who was recognized with a 2010 Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award.
Recent Books Published by Department Faculty
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Recent Books
On the left a random book title by one of the English Department's faculty will appear. You can also view a complete list of recent books or click the Random Title link to see another book by one of our faculty.
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; and for 2011/12 it is "Biopower/Biopolitics."
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.
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.
Lost & Found
Please check with the English Department office in 202 Andrews Hall if you have lost or found something.











