Willa Cather: Place and Archive

In this two-week in-person NEH Institute for Higher Education Faculty from July 16-28, 2023, twenty-five participants will explore place-based and archival approaches to the life and works of American novelist Willa Cather. At University of Nebraska-Lincoln, participants will have access to unparalleled archival holdings of Cather materials and the expertise of a leading center for digital humanities. 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.