Willa Cather: Place and Archive

FAIN: EH-288079-22

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Melissa J. Homestead (Project Director: February 2022 to present)

Participating institutions:
Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska (Lincoln, NE) - Applicant/Recipient
Willa Cather Foundation (Red Cloud, NE) - Participating Institution

A two-week residential institute for 25 higher education faculty to explore place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947).

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln seeks funding to support an institute exploring place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather. At UNL participants will have access to unparalleled archival holdings of Cather materials and expertise of a leading center for digital humanities, and at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, they will experience landscapes and buildings represented in Cather’s fiction that function as a kind of archive. The institute will take a critical approach to all three kinds of archives (special collections, digital resources, and place), considering how they are mediated and what is absent. Cather’s fiction celebrated the achievements of recent European immigrants who settled on the Great Plains but ignored the then-recent forced relocations of indigenous people to make way for settlement. Both the European immigrant presence and absence of the Pawnee will receive particular attention.