Department Newsletter Summer/Fall 2025

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Together with his regular collaborator Jaimey Fisher, Marco Abel published “‘Storytelling is always dealing with the aftermath’: An Interview with Christoph Hochhäusler on Death Will Come” in Senses of Cinema (no. 115, Nov. 2025). This is the fourth in-depth interview Marco has done with the Berlin School filmmaker and is prefaced by Marco’s extensive introduction, a version of which he presented at the recent German Studies Association conference.

Joy Castro’s short story “What You’ll Do” appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review (vol. 64, no. 3, Summer 2025).

Arden Eli Hill has poems out with Impossible Archetype and new words press.

Melissa Homestead's Oxford World Classics edition of Willa Cather's The Professor's House is being published by Oxford University Press just in time for the novel's centennial. 

In addition, she and co-editor Ashley Reed (Virginia Tech) have been issued a contract by Oxford University Press for The Minister’s Wooing for the Oxford Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 

A book edited by the students in the Spring 2024 section of Kevin McMullen’s “Editing and the Publishing Industry” class (English 355) has just been released! Fidelity: An Annotated Edition by Susan Glaspell is now available from Southern Illinois University Press, bringing Glaspell’s fascinating feminist novel back into print for the first time since its initial publication in 1915. Students in the class researched and wrote a critical introduction and annotations to the book, and are all listed as co-editors of the volume. Student Edison Geiler designed the book’s cover. Big thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences for the internal subvention grant that covered publication costs for the book! And even bigger thanks to the students/co-editors (even if they don’t read this newsletter) for all of their work. This is an amazing accomplishment, particularly in just a single semester. 

Last winter, Kevin and four Whitman Archive colleagues at other institutions received a contract from Peter Lang Publishing to edit The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman: The Journalism, volumes 3 and 4, expected to be published in 2027 and 2028, respectively.

An essay co-authored by Antje Anderson (M.A. in art history, 2020), Stephanie P. Browner, Lauren Millhorn (M.A. in English, 2025) and Ken Price won the Margaret Fuller Prize in Literary Studies. The essay, “Houghton Mifflin Readers’ Reports and the Shape of Charles W. Chesnutt’s Literary Career,” will appear in the December issue of New England Quarterly. The authors donated the $2,500 prize money to the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive Enhancement Fund at the University of Nebraska Foundation to support further work on Chesnutt.

Alex C. Valin is co-editing a special issue of ariel: A Review of International English Literature with Sylvanna Baugh (University of Toronto). The issue will be titled “Ambivalent Realism in African and African-Diasporic Literature” and will appear in 2027.

Jonathan Wlodarski’s story collection Love Letters to a Future Ice Age won the Sundress Publications 2025 Open Prose contest, and the book will be published in November 2026. 

He also has several recent story publications in magazines. “Priest Seed” appeared in The Forge Literary Magazine, and “Shock” appeared in the 2025 issue of Clackamas Literary Review. His story “Pollution” is forthcoming in F(r)iction.

At the beginning of September, Marco Abel gave an invited talk – “With Nonchalance at the Abyss: The Cinema of the New Munich Group (1964 – 1972)” – at the conference of the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland in Oxford, UK. At the end of September, he also gave a talk at the annual German Studies Association (GSA) conference in Arlington, VA. In addition to presenting “Christoph Hochhäusler’s Agonistic Genre Cinema: La mort viendra,” Marco also served as co-organizer of two panels on “The Berlin School at and around 20.” Together with the two panels on the same topic he'd co-organized at last year’s GSA conference in Atlanta, GA, they are meant to serve as the basis for a new volume of essays on the Berlin School that Marco intends to co-edit with his regular collaborator, Jaimey Fisher.

Rachel Azima and Benjamin Reed attended the International Writing Centers Association/National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing joint conference in Cincinnati, OH, in October. Together with Jasmine Kar Tang and Katie Levin from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and Meredith Steck from Case Western Reserve University, Rachel facilitated a roundtable titled “We Need to Talk: Reflections on Supervisory Power at the Writing Center.”

Rachel also presented “‘I am still in the Process of Learning Myself’: Assessing Student Learning around Social Justice in a Writing Center Tutor Training Course” at the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning conference in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa, New Zealand, in early November. 

Joy Castro delivered the invited lecture “Recovering a Lost Social World: Cuban Key West in the 1910s” for the 2025-26 Florida Lecture Series at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, FL, Nov. 6. She delivered the paper “The Eluding Subject: Aysun Bademsoy’s Ceaseless Evolution” about the groundbreaking Turkish German feminist documentarian’s latest film at the German Studies Association conference in Arlington, VA, in September, and she taught a multi-day generative workshop at the University of Michigan’s annual Bear River Writers’ Conference up in Hemingway country in August.

Pete Capuano will give the keynote talk for a conference on “The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present” at the London School of Fashion, Design, and Technology in January 2026. The conference is part of an £850,000 AHRC-funded grant of the same name.

Timothy J. Cook traveled to Dorf Tirol, Italy, to deliver a paper on July 8 at the 31st Ezra Pound International Conference (EPIC), which took place at Brunnenburg. As part of the panel “The Epic Realm of Pound and Eliot,” Cook shared his work “The Persistence of the Epic Tradition: Eliot, Pound and Williams.” He also proposed and served as chair of the panel “Pound at Hamilton College: Then and Now,” which took place on July 11.

At the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Philadelphia in November, Melissa Homestead chaired a panel she organized on “Willa Cather and Gender” and participated in a roundtable on “Editing the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe.”

Brett Barney, Ashlyn Stewart (Ph.D. in English, 2024), and Kevin McMullen co-wrote a paper titled “Manuprint in the Age of Digitization,” which Brett and Ashlyn delivered at the European Society of Textual Scholarship conference in Tours, France, in April.

In May, Alex C. Valin co-hosted a seminar with Jasleen Singh titled “The Beginning of the End: Post-Soul Humor” at the online American Comparative Literature Association conference. As part of the seminar, he presented a paper titled “Matzoh Ball Soup for the (Post-)Soul: Black Yinglish Humor in Fran Ross’s Oreo.”

Also, in November, he traveled to the American Studies Association 2025 annual meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, to co-host a roundtable with Daimys Garcia (College of Wooster) titled “Exploding the Ear of American Empire.”

Hope Wabuke was the featured speaker for the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Fall 2025 Writer’s Workshop Reading Series in September.

Kathleen Dillon and Tina Le presented “Discerning Our Values & Decoding Neoliberal Logics During Disaster Capitalism” at the Feminisms & Rhetorics conference in Durham, NH, this past July. Kathleen was also the recipient of the conference’s Nan Johnson Outstanding Graduate Student Travel Award.

Kenneth Michael Hoover presented a paper on Walt Whitman at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, MA, last May. It was his first time visiting the city, and he was delighted to wander around the North End, where he ate pasta and stopped for a cannoli at Modern Pastry. On the last day of the conference, he took a pilgrimage with UNL alumna (now Boston resident) Ashlyn Stewart (Ph.D. in English, 2024) to Walden Pond, where they placed rocks at the site of Thoreau’s cabin.

Over the summer, Malik Rasaq participated in a roundtable discussion on “200 Years of Yoruba Print Culture: Language, Tradition, Aesthetics and Modernity” at the 2025 Lagos Studies Association Conference.

Alina Nguyễn will be on two panels at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, where she will present “Memory Permanence on the Body and in the Poem: A Visual of ‘Peacocks Were Patient Enough to Paint on Their Feathers’” and “Persona: Narration in Another Speaker as Honoring the Ghosts of Familial Pasts.”

Together with five other books, Marco Abel’s latest monograph, Mit Nonchalance am Abgrund: Das Kino der “Neuen Münchner Gruppe” (1964-1972) (transcript Verlag, 2024), was short-listed for the Willy Haas Award. This award – presented annually at the International Festival of German Film Heritage in Hamburg – honors “important international publications on German-language film.”

Rachel Azima and Benjamin Reed, together with Sydney Brown from the Center for Transformative Teaching, were awarded the Summer 2025 International Writing Centers Association Research Grant for their project “Writing as thinking: an investigation into human versus AI interaction during the writing process.”

Additionally, Rachel was re-elected to a second two-year term as Secretary of the International Writing Centers Association Executive Board.

Melissa Homestead’s The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press, 2021) received an honorable mention for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers book prize (the prize is only awarded in conference years).

The Walt Whitman Archive has been awarded a three-year Scholarly Editions and Translations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research and digitize Whitman’s journalism from the late 1840s. Kevin McMullen is the Principal Investigator for the project, which will involve collaborations with scholars and students at four other institutions. In addition to identifying and digitizing Whitman’s contributions as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the grant team anticipates locating previously unknown journalism that Whitman contributed to other papers during this time period. The grant is scheduled to begin in January 2026.

In June, Ken Price received the Julian P. Boyd Award, presented every three years by the Association for Documentary Editing (ADE). This is the highest award given by ADE and is meant to honor “distinguished contributions to the study of American history and culture.” 

Rachael Shah is working with her English 357 class and a group of ninth graders at North Star High School to support the youth in creating their own photo essays, which will be published by a PBS affiliate through a grant from the Hearthland Foundation.

On Oct. 10, Adrian S. Wisnicki and a set of students from his course “AI and Big Tech, Impact and Safety” (the iteration under which he is currently teaching English 277, “Being Human in the Digital Age”) visited the Lincoln Data Center in downtown Lincoln. The visit capped a week-long examination through the course of the environmental and human impact of data centers.

Lydia Abedeen is a 2025 Islamic Scholarship Fund Media Scholar. She has gained representation for her debut novel PROPHET GIRL and will be going on submission in October.

Alina Nguyễn’s poem “Poetry House” was nominated for Best of the Net by Bellingham Review.

Malik Rasaq’s full-length poetry collection, The Origin of Wounds, was announced as the winner of the 2024 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Kaveh Bassiri, who selected the poems, wrote that they “resonate globally, from the Middle East and South America to the United States and its mass shootings.” Professor and poet Khaled Mattawa described it as a “searing and redemptive book” that he will return to for “its fierce compassion and lyrical devotion.”