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Department of English

Melissa J. Homestead
Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies

Melissa J. Homestead Photo

Melissa J. Homestead
336B Andrews Hall
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
(402)472-0323 (office)
mhomestead2@unlnotes.unl.edu

Degrees and institutions granting the degree

  • Smith College, A.B. 1985 (magna cum laude with high honors in English)
  • University of Pennsylvania, A.M. 1987
  • University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. 1998

Professional Areas of Specialty

American Literature and the History of the Book from the Early Republic through the early 20th century, with a focus on women’s authorship

Courses regularly taught

American Literature Survey, The World of Willa Cather, Introduction to Women’s Literature, Survey of Women’s Literature, Introduction to Literature, Short Story, Early American Novel, Graduate Seminars on Women Writers (Women in Print; Willa Cather and the Literary Marketplace)

Professional Activities

  • Vice President, Membership and Finance, Society for the Study of American Women Writers
  • Member of the Advisory Board, The Willa Cather Archive
  • Board of Governors, Center for Great Plains Studies

Selected publications and/or projects

  • American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 (chapters on Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, Augusta Jane Evans, and Mary Virginia Terhune).
  • “Edith Lewis as Editor: Every Week Magazine and the Contexts of Cather’s Fiction.” Forthcoming in Cather Studies.
  • With Camryn Hansen, "Susanna Rowson’s Transatlantic Career” forthcoming in Early American Literature.
  • “Middlebrow Readers and Pioneer Heroines: Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand, and the Popular Fiction Market.” Crisscrossing Borders in the Literature of the American West, ed. Reginald Dyck and Cheli Reutter. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009. 75-94.
  • With Anne L. Kaufman, "Nebraska, New England, New York: Mapping the Foreground of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis’s Creative Partnership." Western American Literature 43.1 (2008): 41-69.
  • “The Beginnings of the American Novel.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature, ed. Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. 527-46.
  • Introduction, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. New York: Signet Classics, 2007.
  •  “Behind the Veil: Sedgwick and Anonymous Publication.” In Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives, ed. Lucinda L. Damon-Bach and Victoria Clements, Boston: Northeastern UP, 2002. 19−35.
  • “‘Links of Similitude’: The Narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Author-Reader Relations at the End of the Nineteenth Century. In Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, ed. Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1999. 76-98.

In progress:

  • With Ellen Foster, critical introduction, notes, and contextual documents for Clarence; or, a Tale of Our Times (1830) by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Under contract with Broadview Press.
  • A Digital Edition of Every Week Magazine (1915-1918).
  • “Catharine Sedgwick Corresponds with Editors and Publishers.”
  • “Catharine Sedgwick and British Publishers, 1822-1857.”
  • With Pamela T. Washington, an edited collection of essays, “Also by this Author: E.D.E.N. Southworth beyond The Hidden Hand.”