Marilee Lindemann

Marilee Lindemann, associate professor of English, served as Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program, in the Office of Undergraduate Studies, 2002-2013. She then stayed on as Director as the program transitioned in 2013-14 into its new home in the Department of Women's Studies. As the founding Director of LGBT Studies, she developed an extensive course list, expanded enrollments, and helped to establish a highly successful queer studies coalition among area universities, faculty, and students. In July, 2014, she was appointed Executive Director of College Park Scholars.

In 2013, she received the W. E. Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award. In 2013-14, she chaired the Senate Programs, Courses, and Curricula Committee, and was elected to the Senate Executive Committee for 2014-15.  She serves on the General Education Faculty Board for Diversity, and chaired this board during FY14.

Lindemann came to the University of Maryland in 1992. She received her PhD in English Language and Literature from Rutgers University in 1991 and a BA in English and Journalism from Indiana University in 1981. From 1988 to 1991, she was an instructor and assistant professor of English at Howard University. Her research and scholarship are focused on American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the novelist Willa Cather, and on queer and feminist theory and new media studies. She is the author of Willa Cather: Queering America (Columbia UP, 1999) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge UP, 2005). She edited two of Cather’s novels for Oxford University Press, O Pioneers! (1999) and Alexander’s Bridge (1997), and has published numerous articles, chapters in books, and review essays in outlets such as American Literary History, Feminist Studies, The Journal of Women’s History, and Resources for American Literary Study. Her blog, The Madwoman with a Laptop, is a project of creative nonfiction that has led to new areas of research and a new 400-level course, “Writing for the Blogosphere.” 

She has won grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. She has served on the editorial board of American Literature and the board of managing editors of American Quarterly. Her prizes and awards include Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay/Lesbian/Queer Caucus of the Modern Language Association (2007), and Medal of Freedom and Liberation from the President’s Commission on LGBT Issues (2014) in recognition of her efforts in building the LGBT Studies Program.