CONTRIBUTORS

TIMOTHY BINTRIM is professor of English at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania. His fascination with Cather’s Pittsburgh began with a weekend observance celebrating the centennial of her arrival in the city hosted by Duquesne University in June 1996 and peaked with the Sixteenth International Seminar, also hosted by Duquesne, in June 2017. Much of his work has explored her writing for The Home Monthly, The National Stockman and Farmer, the Evening Leader, and the short-lived Pittsburgh magazine The Library.
ANGELA CONRAD, a longtime scholar and friend of the Willa Cather community, taught for thirteen years at Bloomfield College in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Among other accomplishments, Angela wrote a book about Emily Dickinson, The Wayward Nun of Amherst, was a critical organizer of the Willa Cather International Seminar in New York City in 1998, and she was also a member of the New Jersey Council for the Arts for close to four years. She has published many articles in The Willa Cather Newsletter & Review as well as Cather Studies. After an eight-year battle with cancer, Angela passed away on 27 March 2019, leaving behind her devoted husband, Roberto Osti, son, Massimo, and daughter, Emilia.
JOHN H. FLANNIGAN is a retired professor of English at Prairie State College, Chicago Heights, Illinois, where he taught American, African American, and British literatures and composition and was president of the Faculty Federation from 2004 to 2013. His essays on Cather, music, and opera have appeared in Cather Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Short Fiction, and the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter.
MICHAEL GORMAN is a professor at Hiroshima City University in Japan. His teaching and research interests include rural American civilization as well as multicultural, environmental, and transnational literatures. Recent publications include “Willa Cather, Cultural Imperialism, and the ‘The Coming Man’” (2018) and “Climates of Violence, Spirits of Resistance: Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God” (2019).
CHARMION GUSTKE is an assistant professor of English and the director of the First-Year Seminar Program at Belmont University in Nashville, where she teaches courses in writing, literature, and cultural theory. Her Cather research examines the material and gendered trajectories in Cather’s life and in her writing. Other scholarly interests include transatlantic literary studies and the work of Henry David Thoreau, on which she has published articles. She is committed to community engagement and employs her service-learning classes to connect students to nonprofit organizations in her continued support of sustainable food practices, social advocacy, and the liberal arts.
JAMES A. JAAP is currently a teaching professor of English and the assistant chief academic officer at the Greater Allegheny campus of the Pennsylvania State University. Recently published pieces include an article on Cather and Southwest painter Ernest Blumenschein in Cather Studies 11 and a discussion of the art and industrial connections in “Paul’s Case” in Cather Studies 12. In addition to co-directing the 2017 Cather International Seminar in Pittsburgh, he currently serves on the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors. He lives in the Friendship neighborhood of Pittsburgh with his wife and two children, not far from where Cather stayed while living in the city.
JOHN J. MURPHY, professor emeritus, Brigham Young University, and a thirty-year veteran of the Cather Foundation Board of Governors, published his first essay on Cather in 1963 and has since contributed scores of essays to leading literary journals and to books. He is the author of My Ántonia: The Road Home; editor and coeditor, respectively, of the Cather Scholarly Edition volumes of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock; the editor of Penguin’s Big Read My Ántonia; and coeditor of Cather Studies 8 and Cather Studies 11. In 1981 he directed the first International Cather Seminar and co-directed the 2007 Seminar in France and the 2013 Seminar in Arizona; he has taught Cather in China, Taiwan, and Europe, and conducted graduate seminars on Cather at the universities of Rome and of Leon and Santiago in Spain. He lives with his wife, Sally, in Newton, Massachusetts.
JOSEPH C. MURPHY is associate professor in the English Department at Fu Jen Catholic University. His essays have appeared in Cather Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, American Literary Scholarship, and other journals and collections. His current research situates Cather in relation to modern cultures of spectacle and performance.
DARYL W. PALMER is professor of English at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. His most recent book is Becoming Willa Cather: Creation and Career (2019). His articles on Willa Cather and the American West have appeared in journals such as American Literary Realism, Great Plains Quarterly, Kansas History, Theory & Event, and The Willa Cather Review.
DIANE PRENATT is professor of English emerita at Marian University and faculty mentor in the Scholarly Concentration in Medical Humanities at Indiana University School of Medicine. Her research interests include the representation of domestic arts and ethnic identity in narrative, especially in the fiction of Willa Cather. She has published several essays in Cather Studies and the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review. She is writing a life of the writer and social activist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
TODD RICHARDSON is an associate professor in the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Goodrich Scholarship Program. He is the editor of Louise Pound: A Folklore and Literature Miscellany and coauthor of Implied Nowhere: Absence and Folklore Studies.
ANN ROMINES is professor emerita of English at the George Washington University and a longtime member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation. She is author or editor of several books about Willa Cather, including the Nebraska Scholarly Edition of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and of numerous essays about American women’s writing and cultures. She is an editor of Willa Cather Review.
MARY RUTH RYDER is a distinguished professor emerita of English of South Dakota State University where she taught and directed Graduate Studies in English. A longtime member of the Willa Cather Foundation, she has published widely on Cather, including in Cather Studies 6, Teaching the Works of Willa Cather, The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory, American Woman Nature Writers, and Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South. Her book Willa Cather and Classical Myth: The Search for a New Parnassus (1990) was recognized by the journal Classical and Modern Literature with its prize for outstanding scholarship. She has also published in The Willa Cather Review and in Teaching Cather, among other journals. She continues to do research on American realism and naturalism and on Midwest farm fiction by women in the golden age of agriculture.
KELSEY SQUIRE is associate professor of English at Ohio Dominican University, where she teaches courses in writing and American literature. She has published previously in Great Plains Quarterly, The Willa Cather Review, Cather Studies 9, Willa Cather and Modern Cultures, and Reception. Her book Willa Cather: The Critical Conversation was published in June 2020 by Boydell and Brewer as part of their Literary Criticism in Perspective series.
KIMBERLY VANDERLAAN earned her PhD in 2006 from the University of Delaware in the area of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century American literature and is now an associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches upper-level American literature courses, critical theory, and composition. She has published extensively on an array of authors in such journals and series as American Literary Realism, Western American Literature, The Explicator, Journal of American Studies, The Journal of American Culture, Cather Studies, The Willa Cather Review, and others.