Joy Castro, Director for the Center for Great Plains Studies
Welcoming the new director
Dr. Joy Castro joined the faculty at UNL in 2007 and is the Olson Chancellor’s Distinguished Chair of English and a Fellow in the Institute for Ethnic Studies.
The award-winning author of five books of environmental fiction, a memoir, and a book of personal essays, she publishes film and literary criticism about the intersections of place, gender, and class in the work of minoritized filmmakers and authors. She edited or co-edited three collections, including the forthcoming The Lives of Immigrants and Refugees: Tales of Migration, Hope, Grief, and Finding Home in Nebraska; founded the book series Machete—which published the winner of the 2024 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize—at The Ohio State University Press; and serves as the Nonfiction Editor at Prairie Schooner, UNL’s century-old literary journal.
The recipient of a McClymont Distinguished Teaching Fellow Award and a Sorensen Distinguished Teaching Award, she offers writing workshops around the country and has taught in the prison system. She directed the Institute for Ethnic Studies, an interdisciplinary academic unit comprising scholars from the humanities and social sciences, for eight years. Her collection of Great Plains short stories A Certain Age (which riffs on the dismissive expression “women of a certain age”) is forthcoming in the Flyover Fiction series from the University of Nebraska Press next fall.
“Richly interdisciplinary and excitingly creative, the Center for Great Plains Studies is a dream home for new knowledge and endeavors. The staff, Fellows, and former Director are extraordinary, and I’m thrilled by the chance to join them as we help the Center flourish, grow, and keep building intellectual and artistic community that makes a difference across our region. There are so many ways to tell the stories of the Great Plains, and we can all be part of that.”
