English Faculty Books and Monographs

Books and monographs by the English Department faculty members are collected here.

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Diversifying and Decolonizing Research: A transformative collection designed to support research that is critical and inclusive

Elise Elder Ed., Rebecca Lee Ed., and Kay Siebler

Sage Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research uses a blend of text research cases, how-to guides, teaching datasets as well as videos to support students and researchers with the knowledge and skills to design and conduct research that is both critical and inclusive. It showcases a range of experiences and approaches from marginalized, under-represented, and vulnerable communities. It will especially focus on decolonial perspectives that challenge traditional research paradigms, especially indigenous research methods.
Misanthropoetics: Social Flight and Literary Form in Early Modern England

Robert Darcy

About the Book
Misanthropoetics explores efforts by Renaissance writers to represent social flight and withdrawal as a fictional escape from the incongruous demands of culture. Through the invented term of its title, this book investigates the literary misanthrope in a number of key examples from Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser, and the satirical milieu of Marston to exemplify the seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of social life.

In Shakespeare’s England a burgeoning urban population and the codification of social controls drove a new imaginary of revolt and flight in the figure of the literary misanthrope. This figure of disillusionment became an experiment in protesting absurd social demands, pitting friendship and family against prudent economies, testimonies of durable love against erosions of historical time, and stable categories of gender against the breakdown and promiscuity of language.

Misanthropoetics chronicles the period’s own excoriating critique of the illusion of resolution fostered within a social world beleaguered by myriad pressures and demands. This study interrogates form as a means not toward order but toward the impasse of irresolution, to detecting and declaring the social function of life as inherently incongruous. Robert Darcy applies questions of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, deconstruction and chaos theory to observe how the great deployers of literary form lost confidence that it could adhere to clear and stable rules of engagement, even as they tried desperately to shape and preserve it.
Black Women Shattering Stereotypes: A Streaming Revolution

Kay Siebler

Black Women Shattering Stereotypes: A Streaming Revolution focuses on the work, voices, and perspectives of Black women in popular film and television. Kay Siebler argues that within the past five years, in response to the digital age and the number of racist stereotypes being purported in dominant culture, Black women creators are making entertainment media that fights back against these racist and sexist narratives and celebrates the realities of being Black and being a woman in today’s world. When Black women are behind the camera, writing, directing, and producing, Siebler finds, the representations of Black women change dramatically in empowering and important ways. Focusing on films and series produced since 2015 that are made by, for, and about Black women, Siebler analyzes the portrayals of Black women and their culture in Bessie, Self Made, Hidden Figures, Harriet, Insecure, Being Mary Jane, Twenties, and Chewing Gum, among others. Siebler intertwines these analyses with in-depth interviews with over one hundred Black women throughout the book, offering a variety of perspectives across the broad spectrum of demographics that are—and are not—being represented in mainstream media.
Strategies for Resisting Sexism in the Academy: Higher Education, Gender, and Intersectionality

Gail Crimmins Ed. and Kay Siebler

This book harnesses the expertise of women academics who have constructed innovative approaches to challenging existing sexual disadvantage in the academy. Countering the prevailing postfeminist discourse, the contributors to this volume argue that sexism needs to be named in order to be challenged and resisted. Exploring a complex, intersectional and diverse arrangement of resistance strategies, the contributors outline useful tools to resist, subvert and identify sexist policy and practice that can be deployed by organisations and collectives as well as individuals. The volume analyses pedagogical, curriculum and research approaches as well as case studies which expose, satirise and subvert sexism in the academy: instead, embodied and slow scholarship as political tools of resistance are introduced. A call for action against the propagation of sexism and gender disadvantage in the academy, this important book will appeal to students and scholars of sexism in higher education as well as all those committed to working towards gender e/quality.
Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2

James Rovira, David Boocker, Lisa Plummer Crafton, Rachel Feder, David S. Hogsette, Ronald D. Morrison, Douglas T. Root, Lorenzo Sorbo, Gary L. Tandy, Janneke Van Der Leest, and Luke Walker

Book contribution, "The Inner Revolution(s) of Wordsworth and the Beatles" by David Boocker.

Rock and Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, and Rock from Dylan to U2 is an edited anthology that seeks to explain just how rock and roll is a Romantic phenomenon that sheds light, retrospectively, on what literary Romanticism was at its different points of origin and on what it has become in the present. This anthology allows Byron and Wollstonecraft to speak back to contemporary theories of Romanticism through Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Relying on Löwy and Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, it explores how hostility, loss, and longing for unity are particularly appropriate terms for classic rock as well as the origins of these emotions. In essays ranging from Bob Dylan to Blackberry Smoke, this work examines how rock and roll expands, interprets, restates, interrogates, and conflicts with literary Romanticism, all the while understanding that as a term “rock and roll” in reference to popular music from the late 1940s through the early 2000s is every bit as contradictory and difficult to define as the word Romanticism itself.
Visions of the Future in Comics: International Perspectives

Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Adnan Mahmutović, and Frank Bramlett

Across generations and genres, comics have imagined different views of the future, from unattainable utopias to worrisome dystopias. These presaging narratives can be read as reflections of their authors’ (and readers’) hopes, fears and beliefs about the present. This collection of new essays explores the creative processes in comics production that bring plausible futures to the page. The contributors investigate portrayals in different stylistic traditions—manga, bande desinées—from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The picture that emerges documents the elaborate storylines and complex universes comics creators have been crafting for decades.
The Routledge Companion to Comics

Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin

This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-to-date overviews of the major topics and questions within comic studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field.

Essays examine:
- the history of the temporal, geographical, and formal development of comics, including topics like art comics, manga, comix, and the comics code;
- issues such as authorship, ethics, adaptation, and translating comics;
- connections between comics and other artistic media (drawing, caricature, film) as well as the linkages between comics and other academic fields like linguistics and philosophy;
- new perspectives on comics genres, from funny animal comics to war comics to romance comics and beyond.
The Routledge Companion to Comics expertly organizes representative work from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. More than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area, guiding students, scholars, and comics fans alike.
Learning Queer Identity in the Digital Age

Kay Siebler

This book explores, through specific analysis of media representations, personal interviews, and historical research, how the digital environment perpetuates harmful and limiting stereotypes of queerness. Siebler argues that heteronormativity has co-opted queer representations, largely in order to sell goods, surgeries, and lifestyles, reinforcing instead of disrupting the masculine and feminine heterosexual binaries through capitalist consumption. Learning Queer Identity in the Digital Age focuses on different identity populations (gay, lesbian, transgender) and examines the theories (queer, feminist, and media theories) in conjunction with contemporary representations of each identity group. In the twenty-first century, social media, dating sites, social activist sites, and videos/films, are primary educators of social identity. For gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual peoples, these digital interactions help shape queer identities and communities.
Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Memorials, and Archives (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication)

Jane Greer, Laurie Grobman, and Tammie M. Kennedy

Pedagogies of Public Memory explores opportunities for writing and rhetorical education at museums, archives, and memorials. Readers will follow students working and writing at well-known sites of international interest (e.g., the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), at local sites (e.g., vernacular memorials in and around Muncie, Indiana and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania), and in digital spaces (e.g., Florida State University’s Postcard Archive and The Women’s Archive Project at the University of Nebraska Omaha). From composing and delivering museum tours, to designing online memorials that challenge traditional practices of public grief, to producing and publishing a magazine containing the photographs and stories of individuals who lived through historic moments in the Freedom Struggle, to expanding and creating new public archives – the pedagogical projects described in this volume create richly textured learning opportunities for students at all levels – from first-year writers to graduate students. The students and faculty whose work is represented in this volume undertake to reposition the past in the present and to imagine possible new futures for themselves and their communities. By exploring the production of public memory, this volume raises important new questions about the intersection of rhetoric and remembrance.
Deans and Development: Making the Case for Supporting the Liberal Arts and Sciences

Anne-Marie McCartan, Carl J. Strikwerda, and David Boocker

Book chapter, "Making the Case for the Arts & Sciences" (pp.95-110) by David Boocker,

Increasingly, deans of the Arts and Sciences are seeking external funds to support their programs and initiatives. In some cases, fundraising has become an explicit expectation for job performance; in others, deans are motivated to seek outside support because they see this as the only way to realize the priorities and goals they have set for their college or school. Yet deans know that they have a special challenge in the development arena as often Arts and Sciences lacks an identity in the minds of alumni and community supporters.

This book will benefit both those just beginning their first deanship and longer-serving deans who are starting to focus on what it takes to bring in private money. The authors are all deans or former deans who not only have been successful in this pursuit but also have found great satisfaction with the process of developing relationships with potential donors. They have found that many generous people need little convincing that a strong liberal arts education is beneficial to society as a whole and that their support of Arts & Sciences faculty and programs can help realize that desired end.

Basic development terminology is covered along with special attention to the working relationship between the dean and the person who serves as the college’s development officer. The authors share examples from their own experiences about what has worked well for them and what lessons they have learned along the way. Deans will be inspired to put the principles from these chapters to work in order to achieve their vision for the future of their college or school.
Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father

John T. Price

John Price appears to have thrown in the towel. He has spent the last year struggling to support his family, neglecting to spend time with his wife and children, and becoming increasingly cynical about the degraded state of the natural world around him. After a heart-attack scare, however, his wife demands that he start appreciating all the “good things” in his life: their mouse-infested old house, their hopelessly overgrown yard, and most of all, the joys and humiliations of parenthood.

In his quest to become a better father, Price faces many unexpected challenges—like understanding his grandmother’s decision to die, and supporting his nature-loving sons’ decision to make their home a “no-kill zone” for all living creatures. Still he finds the second chance he was looking for—to save himself and, perhaps, his small corner of an imperfect yet still beautiful world.
The Well-Crafted Sentence: A Writer's Guide to Style

Nora Bacon

Grounded in the art of writing, The Well-Crafted Sentence zeroes in on the sentence, offering a range of revision strategies that lead students to write fuller, more well-developed prose. In a friendly, conversational style, Nora Bacon makes clear how and why sentences work to focus, balance, develop, and qualify writers’ ideas.

Because students are more likely to try out new sentence structures if they’ve seen them in writing they admire, examples throughout the text are drawn from readings by accomplished stylists whose full pieces are also included in a chapter at the end of the book. Integrated exercises and editing practice help students apply concepts to their own writing.

Affordable and brief, The Well-Crafted Sentence works as a core classroom text or as a supplement.
Linguistics and the Study of Comics

Frank Bramlett

Editor: Frank Bramlett, UNO faculty member.

Chapter 8: Linguistic Codes and Character Identity in Afro Samurai, authored by Frank Bramlett.

Do Irish superheroes actually sound Irish? Why are Gary Larson's Far Side cartoons funny? How do political cartoonists in India, Turkey, and the US get their point across? What is the impact of English on comics written in other languages? These questions and many more are answered in this volume, which brings together the two fields of comics research and linguistics to produce groundbreaking scholarship. With an international cast of contributors, the book offers novel insights into the role of language in comics, graphic novels, and single-panel cartoons, analyzing the intersections between the visual and the verbal. Contributions examine the relationship between cognitive linguistics and visual elements as well as interrogate the controversial claim about the status of comics as a language. The book argues that comics tell us a great deal about the sociocultural realities of language, exploring what code switching, language contact, dialect, and linguistic variation can tell us about identity - from the imagined and stereotyped to the political and real.
The Milton Encyclopedia

Thomas N. Corns and David Boocker

Encyclopedia entries by David Boocker, "Pandemonium" and "Vallombrosa".

The Milton Encyclopedia offers easy and immediate access to a wealth of information about Milton. It will serve as a general and comprehensive reference tool for general readers, students, and scholars alike, enhancing the experience of reading Milton.

Articles cover each poem and prose work by Milton; the life of Milton and the members of his family; all events and all contemporary and historical figures mentioned significantly in his writings; every book of the Bible in its relation to Milton’s own work; printers, booksellers, and publishing history; the critical and editorial traditions; illustrators; and those whose own writing was shaped by Milton’s influence.
What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

Lisa Knopp

In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning.
From the Heartland: Critical Reading and Writing At UNO

Tammie M. Kennedy, Maggie Christiensen, and Rachel Bash

A writing textbook designed for UNO students taking Composition I and features work from local writers, students, and UNO professors.
Modern American Environmentalists: A Biographical Encyclopedia

George A. Cevasco, Richard P. Harmond, Everett I. Mendelsohn, and David Boocker

Encyclopedia entries, "Anne Morrow Lindbergh" and "Charles Augustus Lindbergh" by David Boocker.

Modern American Environmentalists profiles the lives and contributions of nearly 140 major figures during the twentieth-century environmental movement. Included are iconic environmentalists such as Rachel Carson, E. O. Wilson, Gifford Pinchot, and Al Gore, and important but less expected names, including John Steinbeck and Allen Ginsberg.

The entries recount how each individual became active in environmental conservation, detail his or her significant contributions, trace the influence of each on future efforts, and discuss the person's legacy. The individuals selected for the book displayed either an unparalleled commitment to the conservation, preservation, restoration, and enhancement of the natural environment or made a major contribution to the growth of environmentalism during its first century.

With a foreword by environmental historian Everett I. Mendolsohn, a time line of key environmental events, a bibliography of groundbreaking works, and an index organized by specialization, this biographical encyclopedia is a handy and complete guide to the major people involved in the modern American environmental movement.
Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinships: A Memoir

John T. Price

Grounded in place, in the great grasslands of the Midwest, John Price’s large-hearted memoir is nevertheless a story that knows no boundaries. Kinship is the thread that runs throughout, with creatures in his back yard and in the wild, with Swedish ancestors, with neighbors, with the Midwestern prairies, and with his wife and children. Often smiling at the earthy absurdities of ordinary life, and at other moments resonant with both joy and sorrow, Man Killed by Pheasant bears poignant witness to the bonds that link us all.
Composing Feminisms: How Feminists Have Shaped Composition Theories and Practices

Kay Siebler

This book offers an updated, precise and comprehensive definition of feminist pedagogy culled from over three decades of scholarship. The author's historical research spans across the curricula but also takes care to focus on the field of composition and how feminist theories of pedagogy have changed the field of writing instruction. It argues that feminist pedagogy has been the spring board for contemporary theories and practices of composition. In addition to the research on how feminist pedagogy has evolved and shapes composition, the author also conducts three ethnographic studies of prominent feminist scholars/teachers. These studies document how feminists have changed the field of composition and how individual academic feminists in composition and rhetoric negotiate and enact their feminisms.
Milton in Popular Culture

Laura Lunger Knoppers, Gregory M. Colón Semenza, and David Boocker

Book contribution, "Milton after 9/11" (pp.177-186) by David Boocker.

Breathing life into a Milton for the Twenty-first century, this cutting-edge collection shows students and scholars alike how Milton transforms and is transformed by popular literature and polemics, film and television, and other modern media.
Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication

Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, and Dickie Selfe

Co-edited by Tracy Bridgeford, UNO faculty member.

Chapter 7: Story Time: Teaching Technical Communication as a Narrative Way of Knowing, authored by Tracy Bridgeford.

Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication offers a variety of activities, projects, and approaches to energize pedagogy in technical communication and to provide a constructive critique of current practice. A practical collection, the approaches recommended here are readily adaptable to a range of technological and institutional contexts, as well as being theoretically grounded and pedagogically sound. Throughout the collection, its editors and contributors demonstrate the importance of critically engaging students through creative and innovative pedagogies. Programs in technical writing, technical communication, and-or professional communication have recently grown in enrollment as the demand among employers for formally prepared technical writers and editors has grown. In response, scholarly treatments of the subject and the teaching of technical writing are also burgeoning, and the body of research and theory being published in this field is many times larger and more accessible than it was even a decade ago. Although many theoretical and disciplinary perspectives can potentially inform technical communication teaching, administration, and curriculum development, the actual influences on the field's canonical texts have traditionally come from a rather limited range of disciplines. Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communication brings together a wide range of scholars-teachers to expand the existing canon. The editors and authors in this volume suggest that, for various reasons, the field has not been as flexible or open to innovation as it needs to be. Given pervasive technological and workplace changes and changing cultural attitudes, they say, new and more dynamic pedagogies in technical communication are warranted, and they are addressing this collection to that need. Contributing authors include a number of scholars with a strong record of work in composition, technical writing, professional communication, and allied areas (e.g., Selfe, Wahlstrom, Kalmbach, Duin, Hansen), who deliver a variety of approaches that are grounded in current theory and represent pedagogical creativity and innovation.
The Nature of Home: A Lexicon and Essays

Lisa Knopp

For Lisa Knopp, homesickness is a literal sickness. During a lengthy sojourn away from the Nebraska prairie, she fell ill, and only when she decided to return home did she recover. Homesickness is the triggering event for this collection of essays concerned with nothing less than what it means to feel at home. Knopp writes masterfully about ecology, place, and the values and beliefs that sustain the individual within an impersonal world. She is passionate about her subject whether it be an endangered beetle in the salt marshes near Lincoln, Nebraska, a forgotten Nebraska inventor, a museum muralist, a paleontologist, or Arbor Day as the misguided attempt of Eastern settlers to “correct” a perceived deficiency in the Great Plains landscape. Here is a writer who has read widely and judiciously and for whom everything resonates within the intricately structured definition of home.
A Search for Meaning

Paula Harms Payne and David Boocker

Essay by David Boocker, "Milton and the Woman Controversy".
Collection edited by Paula Harms Payne.

In its exploration of drama, poetry, and prose, this collection of nine essays invites students, teachers, and scholars to rethink their evaluations of Shakespeare, Milton, Sidney, Jonson, and other British writers of the Early Modern period. Using a formalist approach,A Search for Meaning establishes new critical perspectives that are dependent on close readings of the text and current secondary research and which carefully consider reader’s reactions.
Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands

John T. Price

Though he’d lived in Iowa all his life, the allure of the prairie had somehow eluded John Price—until, after a catastrophic flood, a brief glimpse of native wildlife suddenly brought his surroundings home to him. Not Just Any Land is a memoir of Price’s rediscovery of his place in the American landscape and of his search for a new relationship to the life of the prairie—that once immense and beautiful wilderness of grass now so depleted and damaged as to test even the deepest faith.

Price’s journey toward a conscious commitment to place takes him to some of America’s largest remaining grasslands and brings him face to face with a troubling, but also hopeful, personal and environmental legacy. It also leads him through the region’s literature and into conversations with contemporary nature writers—Linda Hasselstrom, Dan O’Brien, William Least Heat-Moon, and Mary Swander—who have devoted themselves to living in, writing about, and restoring the grasslands. Among these authors Price observes how a commitment to the land can spring from diverse sources, for instance, the generational weight of a family ranch, the rites of wildlife preservation, the “deep maps” of ancestral memory, and the imperatives of a body inflicted with environmental illness. The resulting narrative is an innovative blend of memoir, nature writing, and literary criticism that bears witness to the essential bonds between spirit, art, and earth.
Service-Learning & The First-Year Experience: Preparing Students for Personal Success and Civic Responsibility

Edward Zlotkowski and Nora Bacon

Chapter: "Writing as Students, Writing as Citizens: Service-Learning in First-Year Composition Courses," co-authored by Nora Bacon, UNO faculty member.

This monograph documents the congruence of two powerful educational concerns: the success of first year students and the potential of service-learning as a teaching-learning strategy. Over the past 10 years in particular, both these concerns have gained an ever larger group of adherents. However, until recently, neither has fully realized how important each could be to the other or the degree to which many of their values, challenges, and even goals overlap.