Susan Naramore Maher holds a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1985). She is the former dean of the College of Liberal Arts and has been a professor of English since 2010. Among her areas of expertise are Western American and Canadian literature, ecocriticism, nonfiction writing, and the long 19th-century of British literature. Dr. Maher has served as president of the Willa Cather Foundation and the Western Literature Association. She serves as a Fellow of the system-wide Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, and is a member of the editorial board of Willa Cather Review.
Recent Publications
Naramore Maher, Susan. “Restorative Narrative: Nonfiction and the Resetting of the Grasslands’ Future.” Great Plains Quarterly 40.1 (Winter 2020): 1-22.
Naramore Maher, Tom Lynch, Drucilla Wall, and Alan Weltzien, eds. Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press: November 2017. This collection represents an innovative collaboration between 18 essayists and 26 poets examining the wider dimensions of landscape writing. All essays and poems have been written expressly for this collection. My chapter contribution is entitled “Superior: Reimagining the Interior of a Continent.”
Naramore Maher, Susan. “Literature of the Great Plains: Nature, Culture, and Community.” The History of Western American Literature. Ed. Susan Kollin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 129-44.
Naramore Maher, Susan. “Great Plains Vernacular: Why Spatial Idiolect Matters.” In Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life, ed. Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson. London: Ashgate, 2015. 147-59.
Naramore Maher, Susan. Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Reviewed in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Cultural Geographies, Geographical Review, Great Plains Quarterly, ISLE, Journal of American Studies, Journal of the West, and Western American Literature, Middle West Review, among others.
Lynch, Thomas P. and Susan N. Maher. Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. This critical anthology provides new readings on Eiseley’s place in American letters. 2012 Nebraska Center for the Book award for best anthology. My chapter is entitled “‘The Places Below’: Mapping the Invisible Landscape in Loren Eiseley’s Plains Essays.”
Naramore Maher, Susan. “Literary Cartography of the Great Plains.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Ed. Nicolas Witschi. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 98-114. Choice 2011 academic selection.
Naramore Maher, Susan. “Untidy Borders: Eamonn Wall’s Negotiation of the American West.” Western American Literature 46.2 (2011): 143-62.