Books by Faculty
Browse our gallery or visit Bailey Library to see books authored or edited by our faculty on display.
Projects and Publications
African Poetry Book Fund
The African Poetry Book Fund promotes and advances the development and publication of the poetic arts of Africa through its book series, contests, workshops, and seminars and through its collaborations with publishers, festivals, booking agents, colleges, universities, conferences and all other entities that share an interest in the poetic arts of Africa.
African Poetry Digital Portal
The African Poetry Digital Portal is a resource for the study of the history of African Poetry, providing access to biographical information, artifacts, news, video recording, images and documents related to African poetry from antiquity to the present. It will also feature specially curated digital projects on various aspects of African poetry. The Portal, led by co-PIs Kwame Dawes and Lorna Dawes in collaboration with UNL's Center for Research in the Digital Humanities, is the newest project of the African Poetry Book Fund.
American Life in Poetry
American Life in Poetry is a free weekly column for newspapers and online publications featuring a poem by a contemporary American poet and a brief introduction to the poem by curator and editor Kwame Dawes. The project was founded in 2005 by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress. The Department of English provides administrative support and is home to the project's offices.
The Cather Project
The Cather Project promotes teaching and research about American novelist and University of Nebraska graduate Willa Cather at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and beyond. The Cather Project produces the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition and Cather Studies, supports research by UNL English department faculty and students on Cather, brings scholars from outside of UNL to present on Cather and conduct research in UNL Special Collections, and organizes conferences and other events.
Charles W. Chesnutt Digital Archive
Writing novels and short stories as Reconstruction failed and white supremacy took new forms, Charles W. Chesnutt chronicled the complex web of familial, social, and economic relationships that zigzag across America’s color line. He published more than sixty short stories in the black and white press between 1885 and 1905, working deftly across genres, including folklore, realism, melodrama, and local color. He was also a public speaker and essayist, and he sustained friendships and correspondence with W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and others. Stephanie Browner of the New School launched the digital archive in 1997, and she has recently been joined by co-editors Matt Cohen and Kenneth M. Price. The site offers fiction, essays, reviews, and poems by Chesnutt, as well as hundreds of reviews of Chesnutt's works. A bibliography and manuscripts section are currently in development.
Connected Histories in the Early Modern World
The book series Connected Histories in the Early Modern World, published by Amsterdam University press, contributes to our growing understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history when an unprecedented number of people—Europeans, Africans, Asians—made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Under the direction of co-editors Julia Schleck and Christina Lee (Princeton University), the series explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale.
Dickens Project
The Dickens Project is an important consortium for research on Charles Dickens and nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies centered at the University of California. With its official membership in the consortium, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln joins some of the finest institutions in the country including Stanford, MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, Vanderbilt, NYU, Indiana, Penn State, Iowa, and Ohio State. The Project sponsors an annual Research Institute and collaborative symposium, a graduate conference on nineteenth-century British literature and culture, occasional international conferences, as well as other institutes, colloquia, and lectures throughout the year. Through their participation in these conferences, UNL graduate students have the unique opportunity to meet and develop collegial relations with Victorianists from a wide range of research-intensive universities.
Husker Writers Program
Husker Writers is a network of high school teachers, college instructors, and community partners who collaborate to sponsor critical and creative literacies, public writing, and meaningful community action beyond the classroom. Teachers selected for the program collaboratively plan curriculum with a local non-profit partner or an instructor at a different institution to create opportunities for students to write for and with public audiences. With grant support from the Coordinating Commission on Postsecondary Education, the program officially launched in the 2017-2018 school year.
For more information, please contact Dr. Rachael W. Shah at rshah@unl.edu.
Livingstone Online
Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that allows users to encounter the written and visual legacies of the famous Victorian explorer David Livingstone (1813-73). The site draws on recent scholarship and international collaboration to restore one of the British Empire's most iconic figures to the many global contexts in which he worked, traveled, and is remembered. Since 2004, Livingstone Online has established itself as a leading archival resource for the study of African history, nineteenth-century travel, and the British Empire. The site's digital collection of high-resolution manuscript images and critically-edited transcriptions – 15,000 images and 780 transcriptions – is among the largest on the internet related to any single historical British visitor to Africa.
Machete
The book series Machete, founded and edited by Joy Castro with the help of assistant editor Rachel Cochran and published by The Ohio State University Press, showcases fresh stories, innovative forms, and books that break new aesthetic and political ground in nonfiction—memoir, personal and lyric essay, literary journalism, cultural meditations, short shorts, hybrid essays, graphic pieces, and more—from authors whose writing has historically been marginalized, ignored, and passed over.
Nebraska Writing Project
The Nebraska Writing Project (NeWP), a network of professional educators and affiliated writers, provides opportunities to improve, enhance and celebrate writing for classrooms and communities across Nebraska. The Nebraska organization is a state affiliate of the National Writing Project, a federally funded network of teachers that works to improve students' writing abilities by promoting teacher development through summer institutes, year-long continuity and school inservice programs.
Plainstate Podcast
Plainstate: The Podcast, sponsored by the Department of English, is a podcast about the humanities on the Great Plains featuring interviews, stories, people, and places.
Prairie Schooner
Prairie Schooner, founded in 1926 at the University of Nebraska, is widely recognized as one of the premiere literary magazines in the nation. Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes and Managing Editor Siwar Masannat lead a team of undergraduate interns, graduate editorial staff, and alumni readers who help publish the quarterly literary magazine.
Provocations
Provocations is a publication of the University of Nebraska Press edited by Marco Abel and Roland Végső. The series publishes short theoretical interventions (30,000 to 50,000-words) into contemporary debates within the humanities and social sciences.
Walt Whitman Archive
The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents. The archive sets out to incorporate as much of this material as possible, drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the United States and around the world.
Student-led Projects and Publications
Laurus
Laurus, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's undergraduate literary magazine, publishes fiction, poetry, non-fiction and visual artwork created and edited exclusively by UNL undergraduates. The magazine publishes and prints its annual issue every spring, and publishes additional mini-issues online throughout the year.
Watershed
Watershed is an independent blog of critical theory by graduate students of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The blog, which began as a series of conversations between graduate students, features connections, explorations and responses to multiple theories, theorists, and issues of interest.