Dr. Jesse Alemán will present a free public lecture “From Cather to Cannibals: The Eco-Gothic and the ‘Peculiar Horrors’ of the American Southwest” on Wednesday, May 18, 3:30 p.m., in Andrews Hall, Room 117.

Dr. Jesse Alemán is a professor of English, Presidential Teaching Fellow, and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of New Mexico, where he has worked since 1999. His research spans two fields: nineteenth-century American literature and Latinx literary and cultural histories in the United States. He recovered and published an edition of The Woman in Battle, the 1876 autobiographical narrative of Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who fought for the Confederacy. He co-edited Empire and the Literature of Sensation (with Shelley Streeby) and The Latino Nineteenth Century (with Rodrigo Lazo) - two foundational collections of US Latinx literary and cultural histories - and has published more than thirty journal articles and book chapters. Currently, he is working on finishing Latino/a Civil Wars, a book about the formation of US latinidad from 1848-1898.

Dr. Alemán’s talk is part of The Willa Cather Distinguished Lecturer series, which is sponsored by The Cather Project, a unit in the Department of English that promotes teaching, research, and public engagement in relation to American novelist and University of Nebraska graduate Willa Cather. The series is designed to promote research on Willa Cather by scholars working in a variety of areas in literary studies and to give students in the M.A. and Ph.D. programs in English at UNL the opportunity to study under such scholars who are affiliated with other universities. In addition to giving his public lecture, Dr. Alemán is teaching a special one-credit graduate seminar “Southwest of Cather,” which aims to put Cather’s fiction set in the Southwest in dialogue with Chicanx and Indigenous authors writing about the region.