Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication
Professor Melissa J. Homestead, University of Nebraska
Monday, October 16
6:00-7:00 PM PT
Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall 111
What makes a digital edition of an author’s letters different from a print one? What editorial and technical work goes on behind the scenes to produce one? And what can users of a digital edition of letters learn? Melissa Homestead will answer these questions by giving a guided tour of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather and explaining the principles and practices behind it.
Melissa J. Homestead is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she directs the Cather Project. In addition to being co-editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather, co- director of A Digital Library of Willa Cather’s Literary Manuscripts, and author of The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press 2021), she has published widely on nineteenth-century American women’s writing and authorship and is co-editing The Minister’s Wooing for the Oxford Collected Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Class Lecture: “Willa Cather: Place and Archive”
(All classes and students are welcome.)
October 17, 2023
1:30-2:45 p.m.
Bundy Reading Room, Avery Hall 111
Description: How can Cather’s creative process best be captured in the new project to digitize her literary manuscripts? What can digitized materials offer to readers that a traditional print scholarly edition may not capture? Professor Homestead will use Cather’s “Old Mrs. Harris” as an example; copies are available by emailing campbelld@wsu.edu.