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Staff

photograph of Emily J. Rau

Emily J. Rau, Editor of the Willa Cather Archive, is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. She is a Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she recently completed her PhD in American Literature. Her dissertation, "Jumping the Tracks: The Railroad in American Literature," explored the intervention of the transcontinental railroad in conceptions of space, place, race, class, identity, and community. Rau also serves as one of the project leads of the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, a cross-institutional collaborative project using digital humanities tools and methodologies to recover the work of American women writers. Her work on Cather has appeared in the Summer and Fall-Winter 2016 issues of the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review, as well as in the collection In the Country of Lost Borders: New Critical Essays on My Ántonia, in a co-authored chapter with Gabi Kirilloff.

photograph of Andrew Jewell

Andrew Jewell, Advisory Editor of the Willa Cather Archive, is a Professor in the University Libraries, the Chair of Digital Strategies, and the Co-Director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Andy served as the editor of the Willa Cather Archive from 2005 to 2022 and has published several essays on Willa Cather and other American writers, scholarly editing, and digital humanities. He is co-editor of the books The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Knopf, 2013), and is co-editor and project director of the digital, scholarly edition, The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. He served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation (2009-2020) and is currently at work on a new biography tentatively titled Willa Cather: The Courage to Be Honest and Free.

photograph of Melissa Homestead

Melissa J. Homestead, Advisory Editor of the Willa Cather Archive and Co-Editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women's and Gender Studies at UNL and Director of the Cather Project in the Department of English. In her scholarship, she specializes in American women's authorship and publishing history from the Early Republic through the early twentieth century, and she teaches widely in American literature and women's writing. Her book The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis was published by Oxford University Press in April 2021. Earlier Essays from this project appeared in Western American Literature, Willa Cather: A Writer's Worlds (Cather Studies 8), Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century (Cather Studies 10), and Studies in the Novel. Additional essays on Cather have appeared in American Literary Realism, Studies in American Fiction, Willa Cather Review, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, “Something Complete and Great”: The Centennial Study of My Ántonia, and Scholarly Editing. She is the Project Director of a digital edition of Every Week Magazine (1915-1918), of which Lewis was managing editor, and co-edited Cather Studies 9, Willa Cather and Modern Cultures. Her extracurricular passions are bicycling, cooking, basset hounds, and cats.

photograph of Lyette Erin

Lyette Erin, editorial assistant at the Willa Cather Archive, is an English Literature MA student specializing in Literary and Cultural Studies. She graduated with a BA in English Literature and Publishing with a minor in Small Business Management from Hastings College. Her research interests include book design, fat studies, print culture, and digital humanities.

photograph of Gwen Klinkey

Gwen Klinkey, editorial assistant at the Willa Cather Archive, is an English MA student with a focus in Literary and Cultural Studies. She graduated summa cum laude with honors from Millikin University, receiving a BA in English Literature and Professional Writing with a minor in History. Her research interests include women's studies, digital literature, video game studies, and contemporary adolescent literature. Some of her most recent projects address the construction and reception of female characters in The Twilight Saga and the modes and methods of narrative storytelling in open-world video games.

photograph of Sally Johnson

Sally Johnson editorial assistant at the Willa Cather Archive, is currently a sophomore Elementary Education major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Sally happens to be (very) distantly related to Willa Cather through her maternal grandfather, Jim Ray, who was a distant cousin of George Ray. After graduation, Sally will probably continue her education in a post undergrad program for Elementary Education or another interest will guide the way. Sally is excited for the next year at the Cather Archive.

photograph of Lilly Young

Lilly Young editorial assistant at the Willa Cather Archive, is currently a junior English and Philosophy major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a minor in Religious Studies. She is in the Honors program at the University, but in her spare time, she also works as a runner at Keating O’Gara Law and enjoys reading, writing and traveling. After she graduates in 2024, Lilly hopes to continue onto graduate school and earn a Master’s degree in creative writing or literature.

photograph of Karin Dalziel

Karin Dalziel is the Digital Resources Designer & Developer in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. As the manager of the CDRH development team, Dalziel leads the technical aspects of most CDRH projects, and specializes in design, web standards, encoding systems, XSLT, and creating attractive, accessible, and usable websites. Presentations include topics such as web development, web design, and digital humanities at venues such as Digital Humanities, the Nebraska Library Association, and Open Repositories. Dalziel was the co-Director of the NEH funded project Revitalizing & Enhancing the Open Source 3D WebGIS of MayaArch3Dand has been a major contributor to many other grants, including the Walt Whitman Archive Infrastructure Revitalization grant and Keeping Data Alive.

Dalziel received her Bachelor's in Fine Art from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in May of 2006 and a Master's in Library Science from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2008. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

photograph of Greg Tunink

Greg Tunink joined the CDRH in December 2015. He previously did workstation management and support with Information Systems at University Housing as an undergrad and Linux full stack web development and server administration with a small business in Lincoln. He is a free/libre open source software and information security enthusiast. He assists the Cather Archive in a variety technical issues.

Greg received his Bachelor's in Computer Science from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in August of 2009 with minors in Mathematics and Business. He also began practicing Shotokan karate-do at UNL in 2007 and has helped teach since receiving his black belt in June of 2012.

Contributing Scholars

Mark Madigan is a contributing scholar for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather. He has also identified people and places in many photographs from Cather's 1902 trip to France. He has made identifications and significantly assisted with descriptions to the following images: 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 386, 386.1, 388, 389, 448, 477, and 479. He has also contributed information for the Bibliography of Translations of Willa Cather's Work.
John J. Murphy has identified New Mexico churches appearing in Cather's photographs of the Southwest, including 2376 (with thanks to Marina Ochoa, Director of the Archdiocesan Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico) and 2377.
Brian Pytlik Zillig is Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research is currently centered on textual analysis and visualization, and he is the creator of TokenX. Brian has developed a customized version of TokenX for the Cather Archive, allowing researchers to do sophisticated analysis of the entire corpus of Cather's fiction. Brian also advises and assists on many parts of the Cather Archive, particularly in the creation of XSLT stylesheets.
Kari Ronning is an Emeritus Research Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Ronning serves as a contributing scholar to The Complete Letters of Willa Cather and was co-director of the Willa Cather Journalism project.
Janis P. Stout Co-Editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, is a Professor Emerita of Texas A&M University and Co-Editor of A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Electronic Edition. Her publications on Willa Cather include Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000), A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather (edited; 2002), Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World (edited; 2004), and Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin (2007). She has also published on Katherine Anne Porter and on American and British poetry and the culture of the two world wars. She was co-editor, with Andrew Jewell, of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (Knopf, 2013).

Over the years, several other people have contributed to the Cather Archive, and they are listed alphabetically below. Currently, only those who worked with the present editorial staff (since 2004) are consistently mentioned; one day, we hope all who ever contributed to the project will be listed here. Ekaterina Apostolova (HTML and XML encoding, proofreading) 2006-2007
Zach Bajaber (technical consultant, designer of Calendar of Letters functionality and interface, and part of the team designing the Geographic Chronology of Willa Cather's Life) 2005-2008
Brett Barney (digital projects editor) 2002-2003; (advisor) 2005-
Caterina Bernardini (editorial assistant on The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2013-2017
Jason Bougger (server maintenance) 2007-
Perrin Carrell (article transcription) 2007-2007
Rachael Carter (XML encoding of the Scholarly Edition of Alexander's Bridge) 2009
Shea Cortez (editorial assistant) 2019-2021
Andrew Del Mastro (editorial assistant) 2020
Simone Droge (editorial assistant for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2018-2020
Mary Ellen Ducey (preparation of images for digital presentation) 2000-2005
Jessica Dussault (programmer and analyst) 2014-2021
Paul Fajman (XML encoding, book photography, image processing) 2004-2005
Julian Fox (XML encoding, proofreading) 2013-2014
Lauren Franken (editorial assistant) 2021-2023
Hannah German (xml markup, creation of the Bibliography of Translations of Willa Cather's Work) 2008-2010
Samantha Greenfield (editorial assistant on The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2014-2016
Paul Grosskopf (editorial assistant) 2019-2023
Erika Hamilton (XML encoding) 2002-2003
Lenora Hanson (scanning, development of citation guidelines) 2007
Rosanna Dell Henning (scanning, letter transcription) 2009-2010
Aaron Hillyer (XML encoding) 2004-2005
Emma Himes (research assistant) 2017-2018
Phillip Howells (editorial assistant) 2020
Hannah Kanninen (editorial assistant for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2019-2020
Gabi Kirilloff (editorial assistant on Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2013-2018
Anna Krause (editorial assistant) 2018
Amanda Kuhnel (Research Assistant for the Geographic Chronology) 2008-2009
Kourtney Leibman (xml markup) 2008
Lacey Lennard (editorial assistant on the Cather Journalism project) 2008-2009
Liz Lorang (electronic edition of S.S. McClure's My Autobiography) 2006
Vicki Martin (xml markup and scanning and the person largely responsible for preparing Cather's fiction and nonfiction periodical publications) 2005-2009
Lori Nevole (editorial assistant for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2016-2018
Linda Pawlenty (editorial assistant for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2018-2019
Karen Pietsch (image scanning, transcription, and XML encoding) 2007-2008
Ben Poehlman (image scanning and XML encoding) 2007
Maggie Rieckman (editorial assistant) 2020-2022
Stacy Rickel (database construction and management) 2007-2012
Gayle Rocz (editorial assistant for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather 2018-2020)
Susan Rosowski (founder and editor who served until her death) 1997-2004
Mia Schaeppi (editorial assistant) 2021-2022
Sabrina Ehmke Sergeant (editorial assistant for A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition) 2005-2007
Katie Sisneros (XML encoding of Cather Studies 7) 2009
Anastasia Smallcomb (XML encoding) 2004-2005
Jessica Tebo (editorial assistant for The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2016-2018.
Katherine Walter (former co-Director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and a consultant on the Willa Cather Journalism Project) 1998-2020
Sarah Weinert (XML encoding, page scanning, and preparation of Guide to Citing the Willa Cather Archive) 2008
Jennifer Welsch (editorial assistant on the Cather Journalism project and electronic edition of S.S. McClure's My Autobiography) 2004-2006
Jamison Wyatt (editorial assistant on The Complete Letters of Willa Cather) 2020-2022