Hello! I’m a scholar who studies U.S. women writers.
Research
You can find me diving into archives to discover how writers get ideas for their stories, how drafts of their writing develop from idea to final publication, and how they manage the business of being a writer. I also study the reception of women writers: how readers react to their writing, and how that reception changes over time.
Teaching
In my teaching, my goals are to help students read adventurously, to delve into relevant research, to shape their writing in light of their readers, and to experiment with new forms of language.
01
Escapism
My current book project examines the roles of escapism and genre in the reception of works by Willa Cather, Shirley Jackson, and Octavia Butler.
02
Willa Cather: The Critical Conversation
A book-length study of Willa Cather’s reception. Published by Camden House, 2020. Available here.
Cather Studies 13
An article that examines Willa Cather’s life in Pittsburgh and her publications in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Available here.
03
Novel, Sequel, Draft
An article that examines the publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (2015). Published in Reception. Contact me for a copy.
04
Receptive Readers
A pedagogical article that examines using book reviews and letters in undergraduate American literature courses. Published in Teaching Modernist Anglophone Literature. Contact me for a copy.
05
Cather and The Omaha Bee
An article that examines the serialization of Willa Cather’s novel One of Ours in The Omaha Bee newspaper. Published in The Willa Cather Review. Available here.
06
Cather Studies 9
An article that examines representations of modernism and regionalism in works by Willa Cather and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available here.
07
My CV
I’m an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Core Program at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus Ohio.
I have served as President of the Reception Study Society and as a Guest Editor / Editorial Board member of The Willa Cather Review.
I’m co-directing the 69th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference on the theme of “Willa Cather and the Readerly Imagination.” Join us June 6-8, 2024, in Red Cloud, Nebraska! CFP and information here.
What’s New?
About
The ideas expressed in this site represent those of Kelsey Squire and not Ohio Dominican University.