Susan J. Rosowski

Susan Jean Rosowski (1942–2004) was a scholar of Western American literature and the author Willa Cather.

Rosowski was born on January 2, 1942, in Topeka, Kansas.(subscription required) She attended high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree at Whittier College in Whittier, California, in 1967. She attended the University of Arizona-Tucson, receiving an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1974.

In 1967 she accepted a teaching appointment at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in 1976, and in 1971 moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she taught courses in English literature, women’s studies in literature, women writers of the West, literature of the Plains, and courses on Nebraska authors such as Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather. As her career developed, her work focused more and more on Cather. In the peak of her career, her published book reviews and professional and community presentations—most of which focused on Willa Cather—numbered in the hundreds. Though her more than 70 scholarly essays explored authors such as Coleridge, Congreve, Sterne, Joyce, Eliot, and many writers of the American West, she largely trained her scholarly attention on Willa Cather. She served as Director of the Cather Project and editor in chief of the Cather Archive, both of which were housed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and also served as a general editor of the Cather Scholarly Edition, published by the University of Nebraska Press. She also served as director of five international seminars on Cather and editor of 18 volumes or journals, many of which were about Cather.

Awards included multiple teaching awards, as well as the Nebraska Literature Award from the Nebraska Center for the Book (1994); Honorary Nebraska Author by the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association (1995–96); the Thomas J. Lyon Book Award for Outstanding Book in American Literary Criticism (2000); and the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award by the University of Nebraska (2004).