19th International Willa Cather Seminar

19th International Willa Cather Seminar Schedule

All Together Different: Reading Willa Cather Across Regions

Seminar Check-In is in the Lobby of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Downtown Conference Center
 

Wednesday, June 25

10:00 am | Seminar Kick-off | Room 7820 

• Welcome, and opening remarks – Melissa Homestead, Kelsey Squire, and Ashley Olson 

10:30 am-12:00 pm | Session 1

Reading The Professor’s House | Room 7970

• Charmion Gustke, White Power in the Heartland
• Tim Maxwell, The Professor’s House [Beautiful]: Willa Cather’s Reconstruction of the Architecture of Paterian Aestheticism
• Robert Thacker, Cather’s Cowboy
   

12-1:30 pm | Lunch Break | Room 7820
 

1:30-3:00 pm | Session 2

Cather and Race | Room 7920

• Sarah Clere, The Absent English Adventurers in North America
• Ashley Etter, Deweyan Localism, Race, and the Declining Frontier in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady
• Ben Siegle, Cather, Arendt, James: Parvenus and Pariahs in The Professor’s House

3:00-3:30 pm | Break

3:30-5:00 pm | Session 3

3A Materiality of Nature | Room 7920

• Patrick Alvis, Gardening Well: Cultivation and Faith in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
• David McKay Powell, Greyfriars Bobby and Cather’s Canine Cohort
• Michael Schueth, “In My Other House Garden”: Queer Domestic Spaces in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House and Robert Ferro’s Second Son

3B Transnational Cather | Room 7820

• Naima Bilal Minhas, Transcending Borders: A Comparative Analysis of 20th Century Regionalism in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House
• Chibueze Darlington, My Ántonia and the Narrative of Empathetic Remembering
• Mark Madigan, From the Prairie to the Outback: Willa Cather in Australia
• Xuesong Zhou, Reimagining Modernity: The Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of New France Space in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock
   

5:00-7:00 pm | Dinner Break – on your own
 

7:00-8:30 pm | Featured Speaker: Jeffrey Insko | Room 7820

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English and Coordinator of American Studies at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses on nineteenth-century American literature and culture and the Environmental and Energy Humanities. He is the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (Oxford, 2018) and the editor of the Norton Library Edition of Moby-Dick (2024). His recent work on energy, environment, and infrastructure has appeared in such venues as the Cambridge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, the Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Post45, and The Dial. He is currently completing a book about energy infrastructure, the Great Lakes, and industrial modernity titled The North 30: An Environmental History of America’s Most Dangerous Pipeline. 

Thursday, June 26
9:00-10:30 am | Session 4

Cather in Washington, D.C. | Room 7970

• Susannah Davis, Willa Cather and Standing Bear Go to Washington: Statues, Displacement, and Regional Identity
• Joseph C. Murphy, Escape from the Museum: The Professor’s House, the University, and the Pragmatic Image
• Steve Shively, Mr. Outland Goes to Washington

10:30 am-12:00 pm | Session 5

Resettling Willa Cather’s Wests | Room 7820

• Emily J. Rau (chair), Willa Cather’s Uneven Ground
• Rachel Collins, “The waste and wear we are powerless to combat”: Willa Cather and the Settler-Colonial Politics of Place-Making
• Paul Burch, Bad Roads and Burial Grounds: Feral Transport Media and Narrative Erasure in Willa Cather’s Migrant Tales
• William R. Handley, “‘It Ain’t My Prairie’”: Willa Cather and Settler Colonialism
• Sarah Jane Kerwin, Temporary Presences on the Mesa: “Tom Outland’s Story” and Mesa Verde National Park
• Ariel Silver, Quilting the West: Willa Cather and the Madonna of the Train
   

12:00-1:30 pm | Lunch Break | Room 7820
 

1:30-3:00 pm | Session 6

Editing and Publishing |  Room 7970

• Daryl Palmer, Editing the Boy’s Diary in The Professor’s House
• Lexus Root, “It’s built that way”: On the Composition of Lucy Gayheart’s Books II and III
• Nathan Tye, “Worked up, studied out”: The Professor’s House and the Regional Turn in Stuart Pratt Sherman’s Late Criticism

3:00-3:30 pm | Break
 

3:30-5:00 pm | Featured Speaker: Noreen Masud | Room 7820 

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.

Friday, June 27
9:00-10:30 am | Session 8

Cather and University Culture | Room 7970

• Lisbeth Strimple Fuisz, The Professor’s House, Land Grant Institutions, and the Appropriation of Indigenous Wealth
• Yohei Yamamoto, The Professor’s House and the Social Position of the University

10:30 am-12:00 pm | Session 9

Ethnic and Regional Identity | Room 7820

• John Flannigan, The Beckoning Kanuck Grandfather: Reassessing Culture and Ethnicity in The Professor’s House
• Rick Millington, The Eastern-ness of Cather’s West: Some Paradoxes of Place and Region in Cather’s Fiction
• Peter Wilson, The West’s Translation of the American South: Western Regionalism, Owen Wister, and the Question of Southern Inheritance in Willa Cather’s “Old Mrs. Harris” 
   

12:00-2:30 pm | Lunch Break - on your own
 

2:30-4:00 pm | Session 10

10A Cather’s Metaphorical Regions | Room 7970

• LaVona Reeves, Alexandra’s “Acute Grief” from Emil’s Sudden Death in O Pioneers!
• Kim Vanderlaan, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House–Phenomenologically Speaking
• Kathryn Woods, Cather’s Queer Regionalism in Translation

10B Cather and Place | Room 7820

• Rachel Collins, “You children used to live in his stories”: Spatial Echoes across Regions in The Professor’s House
• Barry Hudek, The Wreck of the Lucy Gayheart: Lake Michigan, Chicago, and Dangerous Modernity
• Beth Vigoren, Restless Curiosity: Willa Cather’s Expansive Search for Place and Purpose

Concluding Event

6:00-8:00 pm | Loos Room at the Milwaukee Public Library

All Together Different: A Willa Cather Readers Theater 

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: 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.

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL