Notes and News

2016 Willa Cather Spring Conference

The sixty-first annual Willa Cather Spring Conference will be held in Red Cloud, Nebraska, June 2–4, 2016. The theme of the conference is “Both Bitter and Sweet”: Cather, Literature, and the Great War. The years 2014–18 mark the centennial of the First World War and represent a time to reexamine Cather’s writing of that period, particularly her 1922 novel One of Ours, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Topics related to Cather and World War I in particular, and related topics that broaden and extend our understanding of Cather’s work both about and during the war years, will include the critical and popular reception of One of Ours, the novel’s stance on the war, and comparisons between Cather’s novel to other depictions of the Great War; questions of gender, including women’s participation in World War I and women’s writing about war, including those by Cather’s friends Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and Dorothy Canfield Fisher; Cather’s Pulitzer Prize and its meaning to her life and career; Cather’s attitude toward and reflections on war, explored through her novels written during World War I—The Song of the Lark and My Ántonia—and through her letters, her essays “Roll Call on the Prairies” and “The Education You Have to Fight For,” and her short stories of the period; biographical exploration of G. P. Cather, the idea of heroic masculinity, and civilian responses to the war; popular culture of the World War I period, including music, trench art, fashion, and film; poetry and literature of World War I vis-à-vis central issues in Cather’s war writing; memorials and representations of World War I in both high and popular culture; and World War I as setting, both as physical landscape and as the intersection of cultures, competing historical perspectives, and artistic responses. For additional information, see the conference website (https://www.willacather.org/events/61st-annual-willa-cather-spring-conference) or contact the conference directors, Julie Olin-Ammentorp (olinamme@lemoyne.edu) and Max Despain (max.despain@gmail.com).

Fellowship Program

Each year, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, offers a limited number of research stipends for promising and established visiting western scholars in their fellowship program. Scholars can research, write, and develop ideas and manuscripts that expand the horizon of western studies. Fellows may pursue field research in the Cody area (i.e., the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem or the Big Horn Basin and Mountains of the Northern Plains), or work in the collections of the McCracken Research Library or one of the museum galleries. Possible areas of research include Western American art and artists; William F. Cody; western exploration, settlement, and the rise of American western culture; Plains Indian cultures; history of fire-arms technology; western American literature and music; distribution, movements, and ecology of Greater Yellowstone Area wildlife in relation to environmental change and human dimensions of wildlife conservation and management in the American West. Recent awards have covered topic such as Barbed Wire and Western Landscapes, Woolen Blankets across Time and Place, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Western Art, How Horses Ran the American West, and Prince Roland Bonaparte’s Photographic Encounters with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Paris at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Fellows will be granted a stipend based on their submitted budget and the availability of funding, not to exceed $5,000. Fellowships require at least one-week residency or more, dependent upon the parameters of the Fellow’s research needs. For additional information, please visit the Fellowship website at http://centerofthewest.org/research/fellowship-program/ or contact Dr. John Rumm at johnr@centerofthewest.org or 307-578-4050.