Kenneth Roemer


Kenneth Morrison Roemer, a Piper Professor of 2011, Distinguished Scholar Professor, and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his B.A. from Harvard and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of four books on utopian literature, including The Obsolete Necessity, and three books on American Indian literatures, including the co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature. His collection of personal essays about Japan, Michibata de Dietta Nippon , was a finalist for the Koizumi Yakumo Cultural Prize. He initiated and continues to oversee the development of a digital archive of tables of contents of American literature anthologies Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons.

Background

Family

Kenneth Roemer's father Arthur K. Roemer, was an engineer and co-inventor of the stabilizer for the klystron tube that produced narrow band microwave messages that were difficult for the Japanese to intercept during WW II. His mother, Mildred Allison Roemer, was an artist and writer, who was known as the "Long Island Indian Lady".
Roemer married Claire "Micki" O’Keefe Roemer, a former President of the Board of the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators and former General Manager, School Services and Training Channel, Financial Aid, US Department of Education. They have two children and four grandchildren.

Education

East Rockaway High School, Class President, football and track captain; Harvard College, B.A., cum laude, English ; University of Pennsylvania, M.A., PhD, American Civilization ; Yale University.

Career

During his college years, Roemer worked as a farmhand on the Underhill sod and hay farm in Jericho, Long Island, New York. In 1965 he was a recreation co-supervisor for summer programs at the Gallup Indian Community Center in Gallup, New Mexico. From 1967 through 1970, at the University of Pennsylvania, he had part-time positions as Assistant Editor of American Quarterly, a Teaching Assistant in American Civilization, and a Research Assistant in Veterinary Medicine and Immunology. Since 1971 Roemer has taught at the University of Texas at Arlington where, from 1971 to 1978, he was managing Editor and from 1971 to 1986, Book Review editor for American Literary Realism. He developed three courses in utopian literature and eight in Native American literature. He became a Distinguished Scholar and a Distinguished Teaching Professor and in 1995, the Advisor for the Native American Students Association. Roemer has been a Visiting Professor in Japan at Shimane University and International Christian University, a guest lecturer at Harvard, and a Senior Fellow for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. With the USIA Ampart Program and the USIA Academic Specialist Program, he lectured in Austria, Portugal, Turkey, and Brazil. Between 1886 and 2010 he also lectured in Italy, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong and France and co-directed a seminar on utopian literature at the European Forum Alpbach.

Selected Awards, Grants, and Honors

Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons is a digital archive offering insights into the history of decisions about which works of American literature should be studied and taught in academic institutions. The archive includes selected covers, tables of contents from histories and encyclopedias of American literature dating back to 1829, indices since 1963 from American Literary Scholarship, and selected "Extra" essays published at the height of the canon wars in the journal American Literature. But the primary evidence provided is the American literature anthology table of contents, especially examples beginning in the early 1900s. The archive provides more than 1000 pages of these tables of contents arranged in chronological drop boxes. Since 1999 thousands of instructors and students in North American and Europe have used Covers, Titles, and Tables. The archive is the first site discussed in the Introduction to Martha L. Brogan's A Kaleidoscope of Digital American Literature. During the 2016–2017 academic year, the site will undergo major changes that will expand the archive and increase searchability options.

Selected publications

Books