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.

Breaking News

News

Prairie Schooner Irish Issue Launch Party

Prairie Schooner invites you to the Prairie Schooner Irish Issue Launch Party, a two-day event at the Sheldon Museum of Art, takes place on Thursday, February 9, and Friday, February 10. This free and open-to-the-public event features award-winning Irish writers included in Prairie Schooner’s Winter 2011 Special Irish Issue, along with other exciting, Irish-themed festivities.

Thursday, from 1:00 – 3:00 p.m., Irish authors Deanie Rowan Blank and Nuala Ni Chonchuir read and give on-stage interviews in Sheldon's Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium, followed from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. with a panel focusing on contemporary Irish literature.

From 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. on Friday, in the Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium, Irish writers Aidan Rooney and Sandra Bunting read and give on-stage interviews, followed from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m. by the Prairie Schooner Irish issue launch, featuring live guest readings.

Friday evening, from 7:00 – 8:00 p.m. in the Sheldon’s Great Hall, Prairie Schooner will host a reception featuring live Irish music along with Irish-themed food and alcoholic beverages, immediately followed at 8 p.m. with feature readings by Blank, Bunting, Ni Chonchuir, and Rooney.

According to Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner Kwame Dawes, this collection edited by Stephen Behrendt, “constitutes one of the best gatherings of contemporary Irish fiction and poetry in print today. Professor Behrendt has managed to bring together an amazing list of authors and it is our good fortune that we have been able to bring some of these brilliant writers to our campus to be part of this celebration.” Here is a link to the flier and author biographies for the event.

Writer in Residence ZZ Packer

Fiction writer ZZ Packer, this year's UNL Writer in Residence, will be here from March 7-16, 2012.  Packer is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and was recently named one of America's Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine as well as one America's Best Young novelists by Granta Magazine.  Her acclaimed story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. Packer's stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004, and have been read on NPR's Selected Shorts. She was featured in the New Yorker's summer 2010 "20 Under 40" fiction issue.  Her nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer and Salon.  She is a contributor to The Huffington Post, and has appeared several times as a commentator on NPR's Talk of the Nation, and MSNBC.  She has taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

a ZZ Packer will give a reading, free and open to the public, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 8, in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q Street.  (Reception and book signing to follow.)  Further details of her visit are forthcoming.  For more information, contact Judy Slater, Coordinator of Creative Writing, jslater1@unl.edu.

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.

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Listen to Ted Kooser reading "So This Is Nebraska"

Digital Humanities

Frame by Frame

Jonis Agee

Laura White

Recent Books Published by Department 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) will call for a new deal, albeit a biopolitical one; and Cesare Casarino (U Minnesota) will attempt to produce a concept of the "common" and argue for its inescapable centrality for any critical understanding of related concepts such as "capitalism", "biopolitics", and "communism" today.

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.