Jewell reflects on recent Nebraska Lecture

Professor and Willa Cather Scholar Andrew Jewell

When I was asked to give the spring 2018 “Nebraska Lecture” to talk about my research on the American author Willa Cather, I pretty quickly knew that this talk would give me an opportunity to reflect on why I do what I do. Such a reflection can be daunting, but I saw it as a chance to articulate some underlying values that drive my work. And I hoped that what I had to say would resonate with all who work in libraries and seek to promote learning and provide access to the cultural record. In a way, I used my work on Willa Cather as a microcosm for the larger effort of libraries everywhere to curate and publish resources of value.

My lecture, titled “Our Cather Heritage,” draws on a remark from poet John Neihardt, who dedicated a memorial to Willa Cather in 1962 with, in part, these words: “it is for us, the living, and for the living who shall follow us, generation after generation, that we set this Willa Cather Memorial against the flowing years, lest we forget the precious heritage that is ours through her.”

My talk seeks to identify what that “precious heritage” is, and, in identifying it, explain why our continued attention on the life and work of this author is worthwhile. I picked five elements of this inheritance, what I called in my lecture “values or realizations that have been learned or reinforced by my study of Willa Cather.” They are:

1. Diverse Cultural Practices Enrich Our Lives
2. Our Lives are Embedded in Communities
3. Beauty and Meaning Are There, If Only We Can See It
4. “Learn more or less all the time”
5. Have the “Courage to be honest and free”

I hope you’ll take a few moments to watch the lecture in the video below, as in it I explain the five different inheritances and use examples from Cather’s work and life to detail how she communicates these realizations. If you watch it, I hope you also notice where it all begins for me: with gratitude for the terrific team of people I get to work with in the University Libraries.

Andy Jewell
April 4, 2018

Further Reading and Resources:

• Nebraska Lectures
• Nebraska Today Related Stories
• Lecture Video Link