Name Kenneth Roemer | Role Author | |
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Books The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900 | ||
Kenneth Morrison Roemer (born June 6, 1945, in East Rockaway, Long Island), a Piper Professor of 2011, Distinguished Scholar Professor, and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, received his B.A. from Harvard and his Ph. D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity (1976), which was nominated for a Pulitzer by the Editor of the NY Times /Arno Press Utopian Collection, and three books on American Indian literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005). His collection of personal essays about Japan, Michibata de Dietta Nippon (2002) (A Sidewalker’s Japan), was a finalist for the Koizumi Yakumo Cultural Prize. He oversaw the development of the digital archive of tables of contents of American literature anthologies Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons (www.uta.edu/english/roemer/ctt).
Contents
Web site
This website Covers, Titles, and Tables: Anthologies and The Formations of American Literary Canons began as an idea in one of Dr. Kenneth Roemer's graduate courses on Early American Literature in 1998. In an effort to teach his students that American Literature "Canon Wars" had been fought for almost 200 years and to give them some idea of how publishers, editors, academic institutions, and teachers define American literature, and specifically define how this body of literature has been and is still disseminated to generations of students, Dr. Roemer put together a course packet of tables of contents of American literature anthologies.
The packet originally included 36 volumes and quickly grew to more than one hundred pages. Upon realizing the potential of this sort of collection, a digital archive made much more sense and would save many trees. Together with Dr. Matthew Levy, Dr. Roemer created the first digital version of Covers, Titles, and Tables: Anthologies and the Formations of American Literary Canons.
Continued Growth
The next stages focused on adding volumes, especially the second volumes of two volume anthologies. With the assistance of graduate student Robert Flach, the website was redesigned to add in drop down boxes that made access to the volumes and pages easier. This version of the site contained over 100 volumes and more than 1,000 pages. The site had received more than 10,000 hits between November 2006 and July 2009. Additionally, the site has gained favorable attention with scholar Martha Brogan. She included a discussion of the site in her book A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature.
Current Stage
Beginning in the summer of 2009, in collaboration with Bethany Shaffer and Lorie Jacobs, and the Digital Library Services staff at the University of Texas, Arlington,the project initiated the scanning of important anthologies not originally on the database but listed in Joseph Csicsila's Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies.
The project is currently housed in the UT Arlington ResearchCommons