71st Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference
The National Willa Cather Center
413 N Webster St
Red Cloud, NE 68970
United States
Mark your calendars for the 71st Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference!
Cather's writing, from My Ántonia to My Mortal Enemy and America 250 present opportunities to consider how we remember people—and nations.
My Mortal Enemy is told retrospectively and is filtered through the narrator’s memory of Myra. This emotional distance creates ambiguity. Just as Nellie Birdseye constructs an image of Myra, American culture constructs narratives about our heroes, founders, values, and ideals. This theme is relevant in the context of the semiquincentennial, while citizens of the U.S. are celebrating the nation's founding and examining our own history, stories, and national myths.
Additional details regarding invited speakers, programs, and performances are forthcoming.
Call For Papers
Memory, Myth, and Meaning: Cather in Dialogue with America 250
Willa Cather Spring Conference | Thursday, June 4 - Saturday, June 6, 2026
This year marks the centennial of My Mortal Enemy, one of Cather’s least affirmative works and one not produced in the Cather Scholarly Edition (translation: much important work remains to be done!) We invite papers on new approaches to My Mortal Enemy, including but not limited to the following considerations of style, form, provenance, and themes:
- Is MME a short novel, a long story, or something else?
- MME in relation to Cather’s other works
- Unreliable narrators and ambiguity
- Critical reception and the novel’s origins
- The politics of marriage
- Disinheritance and economic precarity
- Caregiving and the medical humanities
- Living under “the ruthless Poindexters,” violations of the social contract
We also invite papers considering Cather on the occasion of America’s Semiquincentennial, including but not limited to the following:
- Crafting identity – individuals, regions, and nations
- Work and technology
- Peopling and migration
- Politics and power
- Aesthetics and symbolism
- America in the world
- Environment and geography
- American mythmaking
- Cather and legacy building – memorialization, museums, adaptation, canonization
- Cather in public spaces and spectacles – libraries, railroads, parades, award ceremonies
Proposals of no more than 500 words should describe individual papers or presentations approximately twenty minutes long. Innovative formats are encouraged. Abstracts, along with a short bio, your contact information and institutional affiliation, should be submitted to Rachel Olsen, Director of Education and Engagement, via the Spring Conference Proposal Form by March 2, 2026. Responses to proposals will be sent by mid-March. Questions may be submitted to Rachel Olsen or Tim Bintrim, Academic Advisor of the 2026 Spring Conference, at TBintrim@francis.edu.