ROSOWSKI, Susan J(ean) 1942-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE— See index for CA sketch: Born January 2, 1942, in Topeka, KS; died of cancer November 2, 2004, in Garland, NE. Educator and author. Rosowski was an English professor best known as an authority on American author Willa Cather. A 1964 graduate of Whittier College, she did her graduate work at the University of Arizona, where she earned an M.A. in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1974. Hired as an instructor at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln in 1971, she became a full professor in 1986 and was named the Adele Hall Distinguished Professor of English in 1991. With the exception of the years 1976 through 1982, when she taught at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Rosowski spent her entire career at Lincoln. It was there that she worked tirelessly on researching Cather, the author of the novel My Antonia. Rosowski is often credited with helping Cather's work gain the recognition it deserves in American literature. The scholar was the founding director of the Plains Humanities Alliance, editor-in-chief of Cather Studies, and general editor of the "Cather Edition" at the University of Nebraska Press. She edited or coedited a number of studies about Cather, including The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather's Romanticism (1986) and Approaches to Teaching Cather's "My Antonia" (1989), as well as editing Cather's O Pioneers!: Willa Cather Scholarly Edition (1992). Rosowski was also interested in the literature of the American West in general, and was the author of Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (1999). Internationally recognized for her scholarship, Rosowski was honored several times; she received the Mildred R. Bennett Nebraska Literature Award in 1994 and earned the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award from the University of Nebraska in 2004.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

ONLINE

University of Nebraska—Lincoln Web site,http://ascweb.unl.edu/ (January 27, 2005).

OTHER

UNL English Department Newsletter & Calendar, November 5, 2004.