Calls for Proposals

Call for Applications: Nebraska Cather Collaborative Research Grants for Willa Cather Scholarship (2027)

The Cather Project of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) English Department, in cooperation with the Willa Cather Archive of the UNL Libraries and the National Willa Cather Center (NWCC) in Red Cloud, announces the availability of research grants for visiting scholars. These grants provide financial support for scholars to travel to and reside in Nebraska for one to four weeks to conduct research on Willa Cather in UNL Archives and Special Collections and in the Archive of the NWCC. Scholars from advanced doctoral students through senior faculty are invited to apply.

Proposed projects should reflect the need to conduct research in UNL Archives and Special Collections, although researchers are also encouraged to conduct research at the NWCC and to experience Cather’s Nebraska hometown during their residence. Red Cloud is 2 1⁄2 hours from Lincoln by car. Successful applicants will be awarded $1,250 per week for up to four weeks. The deadline for submission of materials is DECEMBER 15, 2026, and we will inform successful applicants by JANUARY 1, 2027. Weeks in residence, which need not be consecutive, should fall between January 1, 2027 and December 31, 2027.

The Cather Project will assist successful applicants with advice about travel and lodging. When successful applicants are in residence, they will receive advice and guidance from scholars associated with the Cather Project and the Willa Cather Archive. 

The Cather Project produces the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and Cather Studies, both published by the University of Nebraska Press. The Willa Cather Archive is a digital project dedicated to study of Willa Cather's life and writings and the home of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. The Archives and Special Collections of the UNL Libraries holds the largest collection of letters from and to Cather; edited typescripts and manuscripts of her works; multiple editions of her works; and many other Cather-associated materials. For more on these collections, see the finding aids for the various Cather-related collections. The growing archive of the National Willa Cather Center includes books, letters, photographs, and personal items. Information about these collections can be accessed here. Please note that almost all extant letters are published as part of the Complete Letters of Willa Cather on the Willa Cather Archive.

These grants are funded by the Willa Cather Fund and the Roberta and James Woodress Fund, which are administered by the University of Nebraska Foundation. When schedule and availability permits, the NWCC may provide in-kind support in the form of housing in Red Cloud.

To apply, please send to Professor Melissa J. Homestead (mhomestead2@unl.edu), Director of the Cather Project, as e-mail attachments (PDF preferred) the following items:

• your c.v. (please limit to 2 pages)
• an application statement of no more than 3 pages describing your proposed research project and the importance of materials and resources at UNL and the NWCC to your project (please be specific).

Please address questions about these grants to Melissa Homestead.

Cather Different

20th Willa Cather International Seminar
November 17-20, 2027
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Seminar Co-Directors: Jesse Alemán, University of New Mexico; Melissa J. Homestead, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and Heather McClure, Chávez Library at the New Mexico History Museum

The Willa Cather International Seminar is returning to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the conference was last held in 1990. Sometimes called “The City Different,” Santa Fe’s history as a hub of contact, commerce, conflict, creativity, and survival spans Spanish colonial rule, Mexican independence, and US annexation. Before, during, and after these settler colonial movements and in the present day, Indigenous people lived in and moved through the region’s deep history of place and its complex cultural legacy.

Our return to The City Different seeks to provoke broader conversations about what it means to read and write about Willa Cather at the current moment. Does reading Cather make a difference in our present moment, and how does our present moment challenge us to read Cather differently? How does returning to Santa Fe invoke and invite different readings of Cather’s works, including their relation to time, place, people, and history? The centennial of the publication of Death Comes for the Archbishop especially invites us to examine how to read and teach the novel–its representation of people, place, and cultural practices–in the context of a city, state, and region marked by difference. However, our return to Santa Fe also asks us to return to Cather’s writings more broadly to consider them differently for different times. 

We solicit submissions for papers on a variety of topics related to Cather and her work. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that bring history, anthropology, archeology, or art history to bear on Cather’s works and invite methodologies such as settler colonial studies, queer theory, ecocriticism, or critical pedagogies that move Cather studies in new directions. Topics for paper proposals related to the seminar theme might include:

• Layers of time, place, and history in the writing, publication history, or  plot of Death Comes for the Archbishop

• Cather’s southwest: representation, ruins, regionalism, landscape, and the environment 

• Cather in relation to Anglo-American artists and writers who migrated to and visited New Mexico in the early and mid-twentieth century (Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, D.H. Lawrence)

• How do Mexican American or Indigenous writers, artists, thinkers, or teachers offer a different sense of place than the one Cather imagined in her work? How do they engage with Cather or offer alternatives to her writings?

• Cather as queer, different, or non-conforming in her life, letters, fiction, or poetry

• Teaching Cather differently in classrooms and communities weathering different political climates. 

• Cather, conservatism, and the conservative turn, then and now. 

• Race and Racialization in Cather’s writings in their historical context and in ours. 

• Mapping Cather scholarship since the 1990 seminar: How is it different now than it was in 1990, and where might Cather studies go in the future? What approaches and fields might drive Cather scholarship in different directions?

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 March 1, 2027. 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 Spring 2027. Please send questions about proposals and the submission process to internationalseminar@willacather.org.

SUBMIT YOUR PROPOSAL