19th International Willa Cather Seminar
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Downtown Conference Center
161 West Wisconsin Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53203
United States
We hope you will make plans to attend the 19th Willa Cather International Seminar in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as we celebrate the 100th publication anniversary of The Professor's House!
International Seminar Lodging Options
A block of rooms is available at the Holiday Inn Express–Milwaukee Downtown at rates starting at $159/night. To reserve, click this link to our room block reservation page. The cut-off date for seminar pricing is May 9, 2025.
Call for Papers (Closed)
Call for Papers: All Together Different: Reading Willa Cather Across Regions
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, June 25-27, 2025
Conference Co-Directors: Melissa J. Homestead, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Kelsey Squire, Ohio Dominican University
2025 is the centennial of the publication of Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, a novel that traverses regions in action and in memory: a Midwestern university town in an unnamed state on Lake Michigan, cattle and mesa country in Northern New Mexico, and the grasslands of Kansas. We take our title and the conference’s location from the titular professor’s recollection of the difficulty of explaining Lake Michigan to his friends in France: "it is altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue, but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls, but—I don't know, il est toujours plus naïf." The Program Committee of the 2025 Cather Seminar invites proposals for papers on Cather’s relationship to region, broadly construed, and especially papers that propose to read across region in Cather’s works and life. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Blue humanities and Lake Michigan as an inland sea
Bioregionalsm and sustainability
Industrialization and the Rustbelt
Literary regionalism: Cather’s relationship to earlier literary regionalism and to regional traditions of the twentieth century
Geospatial humanities: using digital tools to explore region in Cather’s life and works
Settler colonial studies: displacement of indigenous peoples, land grant universities
Ecocriticsm and environmental humanities
The rise of cultural anthropology and Cather’s understanding of place
Graduate students and scholars new to Cather’s work are encouraged to make proposals. Scholarships will be available for select student presenters from the National Willa Cather Center and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Scholars should submit a proposal of no more than 500 words by January 15, 2025. Proposals can be submitted by clicking "Submit Your Proposal" below and completing the provided Google Form. Decisions about acceptance to the conference will be communicated in early 2025.
Jeffrey Insko
Noreen Masud
Noreen Masud is a lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions. While Masud works mostly on twentieth-century literature, she also make forays into Victorian and Romantic literature. Her upcoming book, Flat Landscapes in Twentieth-Century Literature, focuses on D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. Portions of the manuscript have been published in Textual Practice and Twentieth-Century Literature.