Trains, Plains, and New Terrains: The Past, Present and Future of the Humanities
Click here for a copy of the 2016 Conference Program (DRAFT)
Joe Starita
Starita is an author and professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications. He will be our Saturday lunchtime speaker.
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Michael John Garcès
A director, playwright, and currently the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, Garcès will be our Thursday evening keynote speaker.
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Andrew Jewell
Jewell is a professor of Digital Projects at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries and the editor of the Willa Cather Archive. He will be our Friday’s lunchtime speaker.
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Central Division Conference: Omaha, NE
“Trains, Plains, and New Terrains: The Past, Present and Future of the Humanities”
Embassy Suites by Hilton Omaha Downtown Old Market
November 3-6
Click here for a copy of the 2016 Conference Program (DRAFT)
It is time to register for the 2016 CCHA Central Division Conference! The conference will be held in Omaha, Nebraska, at the Embassy Suites by Hilton Omaha Downtown Old Market on November 3-6. This year’s theme is “Trains, Plains, and New Terrains: The Past, Present and Future of the Humanities.”
Our esteemed speakers this year are Joe Starita (Thursday evening), author and professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications; Michael John Garcès (Friday lunch), a director, playwright, and currently the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company; Andrew Jewell (Saturday lunch), professor of Digital Projects at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries and the editor of the Willa Cather Archive.
We hope to see you in Omaha in November for what will certainly be another wonderful Central Division Conference! Current CCHA members can register by selecting the Register button below.
Please note that you must be a member of CCHA to register! If you are a member but do not have a username or password, click HERE.
Extended Speaker Bios
Joe Starita – Thursday Evening
Joe Starita is a professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Journalism and Mass Communications. For the past 10 years, he has taught many of the college’s depth reporting classes – classes designed to give students the skills to probe deeply into a focused topic while also providing some international reporting opportunities. To that end, he has taken groups of students to Cuba, France and Sri Lanka. Closer to home, he has co-taught a depth reporting class that exhaustively examined the pros and cons of corn-based ethanol and a legislative attempt to significantly strengthen state immigration laws. His classes also have produced two depth reports focused on Native American women. Before joining the journalism faculty in 2000, Starita spent 13 years at the Miami Herald and served as the paper’s New York bureau chief from 1983-1987.
Starita returned to his native Nebraska in 1992 and began work on a three-year book project about five generations of an Indian family. The Dull Knifes of Pine Ridge – A Lakota Odyssey was published in 1995 by G.P. Putnam and Sons (New York), has been translated into six foreign languages and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
In 2009, St. Martin’s Press published Starita’s I Am a Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice, a book on the life and death of Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who, in 1879, unwittingly ended up in the crosshairs of a landmark legal case. That book was the One Book-One Lincoln selection for 2011 and the One Book One Nebraska pick for 2012. In July 2011, Starita received the Leo Reano Award, a national civil rights award, from the National Education Association for his work with the Native American community.
Michael John Garcès – Friday Lunch
Michael John Garcès is the artistic director of Cornerstone Theater Company, a community engaged theater company in Los Angeles where he has directed several plays including California: The Tempest by Alison Carey, Plumas Negras by Juliette Carrillo and Café Vida by Lisa Loomer. He has also written two plays for Cornerstone, Consequence and Los Illegals. Other plays he has written include THE WEB (needtheatre), Acts of Mercy (Rattlestick) and Points of Departure (INTAR). Other short plays include Americanas for Mixed Blood’s upcoming “All Latino All The Time” and plays for The Humana Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Collaboraction, Red Fern, and The Director’s Project. Recent directing credits include Lights Rise on Grace (Woolly Mammoth), Wrestling Jerusalem (Intersection for the Arts), The Body of an American (Wilma Theatre), and red, black and GREEN (a blues) (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; toured to various locations including BAM and the Kennedy Center).
Andrew Jewell – Saturday Lunch
Andrew Jewell is a Professor of Digital Projects at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries and the editor of the Willa Cather Archive. Andy has published several essays on Willa Cather and other American writers, scholarly editing, and digital humanities. He is co-editor of the book The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2011) and has edited, with Janis P. Stout, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather(Knopf, 2013). He also serves as co-editor of the open-access, digital journal Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing.