Marco Abel published “Mind the Gap: New German Films at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival” (7,400 words) in Senses of Cinema 109 (May 2024).

Additionally, Marco’s new book, Mit Nonchalance am Abgrund: Das Kino der “Neuen Münchner Gruppe” (1964 – 1972) [With Nonchalance at the Abyss: The Cinema of the “New Munich Group” (1964 – 1972)], was just published by transcript Verlag. 

According to one of contemporary Germany’s most important filmmakers, Dominik Graf, “The ‘New Munich Group’ is perhaps the most interesting movement in West German post-war cinema because its starting points, its vectors, run counter to everything that the acclaimed auteur cinema propagated then and now. Here there are exercises in coolness up to a kind of noble-spirited almost-indifference, ‘dilettantism’ lives in the films as a creative force, Marquard Bohm and Werner Enke and many others show us some of West Germany’s most original acting performances. Marco Abel tackles the group-wave, locates it for a future of cinema, and differentiates its leading characters. There can be no more important publication on German film history in recent years.” And Lisa Gotto, Professor for Theory of Film at the University of Vienna, writes: “With a confident sense for radical nonchalance, Marco Abel takes us to the edge of the dominant representational regimes. There he directs his attention to the affective areas of a cinema culture that does not lose itself in either/or, but rather plunges itself joyfully into everything at the same time. In discussions and analyses, Abel reveals the films of the ‘Neue Münchner Gruppe’ as events nourished by life, from whose contradictions and frictions sparks still fly today. Marco Abel’s study is essential reading for anyone seeking to grasp the complexity and subtlety of German cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone who is interested in the diversity and innovative spirit of German filmmaking cannot ignore this smart book.”

The result of a dozen years of archival research and writing, the book seeks to reinsert this long-forgotten group of filmmakers into (German) film history by not only recovering their films from their invisible existence in German film archives and offering a theoretical framework for thinking about them both in their historical context and with an eye on what they may still have to offer our present but also by allowing the filmmakers to speak in their own words. The book consists of an extensive introduction to the New Munich Group, a conclusion that addresses their afterlife, as well as 5 analytic chapters and 6 interviews Marco conducted with the group’s main protagonists. Supplementing the ~145,000 words-long book are almost 500 screen grabs, collaged (shout-out to Erin Chambers and her Photoshop wizardry) into 170 images from 28 films that, with few exceptions, are not regularly available to the public.

In the coming months, Marco will present the books in cinemas in Germany’s four largest cities at events that include film screenings and that will be attended by some several of the group’s filmmakers. 

James Brunton’s article “‘Make People Live with It’: Sound, Suture, and Transgender Embodiment in Punch Line (dir. Becky Cheatle, 2022, Ireland)” was accepted by the journal Film Criticism and will be published in 2025.

Melissa Homestead’s co-authored article with Emily Rau (Ph.D. in English, 2021, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the libraries), “Editing Willa Cather’s Letters for Digital Publication: A Dialogue,” was published as part of the “Future Pasts” forum on the Modernism/Modernity Print Plus platform on September 12, 2024.

Katie Marya has three prose poems coming out in the forthcoming issue of AGNI.

Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiri, Adrian S. Wisnicki, and their Kenyan and British collaborators recently wrapped up “Recovering the Histories of Land Treaties in East and Southern Africa.” The project received funding in the form of an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant. Among the outcomes, the project includes essays on “The 1904 and 1911 Maa-British Land Agreements” (available in English  and in Kiswahili) and “Decolonizing LLMs Through Analysis of Land Treaty Literature and History,” which were first authored by Wahu-Mũchiri and Wisnicki, respectively.

Over the summer, Chaun Ballard’s poem “The Ghost of Johnnie Taylor Reflects” was published in The Atlantic. This poem will be included in Ballard’s forthcoming collection, Second Nature, to be published by BOA Editions, Ltd., in the spring of 2025. Chaun would like to extend his gratitude to Dr. Ken Price for cultivating opportunities for students and for encouraging Chaun in his poetic practice.

Tara Ballard’s poem “The Contract” was published in The Atlantic over the summer. Like Chaun, she is grateful for Dr. Ken Price’s encouragement and the opportunities that Dr. Price cultivates for his students.

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s full-length poetry collection, The Naming, has been accepted by African Poetry Book Funds for publication in the fall of 2025 via the University of Nebraska Press. Two of his poems, “Naming” and “I Balanced the Sun and the Moon on My Palms,” were published by Lit Mag in their issue 08.

Mavis Beckson gave an invited talk on regenerative rhetorics at the Colorado Chataqua in Boulder, CO, and presented a paper on “Unremarkable Absences and/as Uncounted Rhetorics: Surfacing Structures of Rhetorical Activity” at the Rhetoric Society of America conference in May 2024.

Melissa Homestead presented an invited keynote at the Central Region Humanities Center biennial conference at the University of Ohio in September. The conference theme was Gender and Sexuality in the Midwest, and Melissa’s talk was on “Memorializing Willa Cather in Cold War Nebraska: How the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Navigated Questions of Gender and Sexuality.”

In July, Katie Marya attended the annual Dance Studies Association conference in Buenos Aires to present her paper “Market, Identity, and Tania Cannarsa in the Rise of Latin Dance Congresses.”

Ber Anena attended the fourth Furious Flower Poetry Conference, where she staged a performance titled This God is Female. The conference, which happens every ten years, was held at James Madison University in Virginia from September 18-21, 2024.

In the context of the Locarno (Switzerland) Film Festival, Marco Abel talked with German (“Berlin School”) filmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler about his work, including his new film, La mort viendra (Death Will Come), which premiered at the festival’s Concorso Internazionale (the main competition), in Jaimey Fisher’s study-abroad course for the University of California-Davis.

Steve Buhler was a textual advisor for Flatwater Shakespeare’s summer 2024 production of Hamlet, directed by Ann Marie Pollard; he also performed as Polonius. He discussed the production with Genevieve Randall on Nebraska Public Media’s Friday Live broadcast on August 30, 2024. The segment starts at 54:43, right after Kwame Dawes provides background to his latest collection, Sturge Town (starting at 46:27).

Next, Steve will serve as Dramaturg for Flatwater Shakespeare’s The Turn of the Screw, directed by Emily Funkey, presenting Jeffrey Hatcher’s stage adaptation of the classic novella by Henry James. Appropriately enough for the season, shows will take place at Wyuka Stables October 17-20 and 24-27.

James Brunton was named a semifinalist in the Black River Chapbook Competition for his poetry manuscript Queer History.

In early September, the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive published just over 200 new letters written or received by Chesnutt, with another 80 letters soon to follow. That will bring the total number of letters on the Chesnutt Archive to over 450. All letters have been published with the generous support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the publishing arm of the U.S. National Archives, and thanks to a fruitful and ongoing collaboration with the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio.

The project directors (Ken Price and Stephanie Browner of The New School in New York City) give thanks to the whole Chesnutt Archive team for their work over the past year: our stellar transcription and encoding team of Bianca Swift (M.A. in English, 2024), Chaun Ballard, and Lauren Millhorn; our Chesnutt Archive interns in Cleveland, Amber Smith, Nevaeh Pasela, and Jose Fontanez; and our researcher/annotator extraordinaire, Antje Anderson. Further thanks to the staff at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) for their technical expertise and help getting the letters across the finish line—in particular, we are grateful for Laura Weakly’s extensive contributions. And, finally, thanks to Brett Barney, Matt Cohen, and Kevin McMullen for their invaluable work. The publication of these letters advances Chesnutt scholarship and contributes to the history of Black literature and Black Cleveland in the early 20th century.

In May, the Chesnutt Archive received another grant (1 year, $125,000) from the NHPRC to continue work on Chesnutt’s correspondence.

Debbie Minter joined a number of UNL colleagues in securing a Grand Challenge Planning Grant focused on developing resources to support adolescents’ successful transition from out-of-school placements back into school settings.

Shari Stenberg’s Mellon Foundation funded project, “Gender Unbound: The Counter-Stories Project,” kicks off this fall with a new undergraduate course called “Storytelling as Resistance: Gender, Sexuality, and Race.” For more information, see this Daily Nebraskan story.

Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiri’s new book, Writing on the Soil: Land and Landscape in Literature from Eastern and Southern Africa (University of Michigan Press, 2023), is a finalist for the 2024 Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize. The African Studies Association (ASA) awards this book prize annually to the author of the best book on East African Studies published in the previous calendar year.

In late March, the Walt Whitman Archive launched its redesigned and reengineered website, the work of several years and many individuals, and made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This major overhaul involved a reorganization of the site’s major sections, improvements to image browsing, an upgrade of the site’s search functions, support for mobile devices, as well as the addition of new content. Most importantly, the underlying infrastructure of the site was fully redone and migrated to a new publication platform, a time-intensive but crucial measure for the sustainability and longevity of the project and its data. The project directors (Ken Price, Matt Cohen, and Ed Folsom of the University of Iowa) would like to thank the development team at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH)—Karin Dalziel, Erin Chambers, Will Dewey, Greg Tunink, and Nikki Gray, as well as former programmers Jessica Dussault and Sarita Garcia—for all of their work. Further big thanks to Kevin McMullen, Brett Barney, and Ashlyn Stewart (Ph.D. in English, 2024).

With support from a second NEH grant, the Whitman Archive published in June nearly 800 newspaper editorials that appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Times in the late 1850s. The editorials are accompanied by annotations and images of the full newspaper issue in which the texts appeared, as well as a series of introductory essays. For this project, the interdisciplinary, multi-institutional grant team, overseen by Kevin McMullen, developed a new method of authorship attribution for anonymous periodical texts, making use of computational stylometric analysis, in order to identify the editorials that were most likely authored by Whitman. Kevin would like to thank the other journalism project editors—Stephanie Blalock (University of Iowa), Stefan Schöberlein (Texas A&M University–Central Texas), and Jason Stacy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)—as well as UNL research assistants Tara Ballard, Karie Cobb, Samantha Gilmore (Ph.D. in English, 2024), and Jeff Hill (M.A. in English, 2022). Many thanks also go to Ken Price and Matt Cohen for their guidance and diligent proofing of the editorials.

An essay by Zainab Omaki, “Nineteen Insecurities as Exposed by the Harsh Glare of a Dentist’s Operating Light,” received Honorable Mention in the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2024 Intro Journals Project.