Kenneth Roemer

Family

Kenneth Roemer’s father Arthur K. Roemer (1912-2005), 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 (1906-2003), was an artist and writer, who was known as the (non-Native) “Long Island Indian Lady.”

Roemer married Claire “Micki” O’Keefe Roemer (1946 - ), a former President of the Board of the National Association of Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA) 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 (1959-1963), Class President (1960-1963), football (1962–63) and track (1961–63) captain; Harvard College, B.A., cum laude, English (1963–67); University of Pennsylvania, M.A., Ph.D., American Civilization (1967-1971); Yale University (1982: FIPSE Institute, Reconstructing American Literature).

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 (1982-1983) and International Christian University (1988), a guest lecturer at Harvard (1993), and a Senior Fellow for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (1988). With the USIA Ampart Program (1988) and the USIA Academic Specialist Program (1991), 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 (Austria, 2008).

Books

• The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1988-1900. Kent: Kent State UP, 1976.
• The Human Drift by King Camp Gillette, Intro and Text. Delmar: Scholar’s Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976, 2000. (facsimile edition)
• America as Utopia (ed.). New York: Burt Franklin, 1981.
• Build Your Own Utopia: An Interdisciplinary Course in Utopian Speculation: Washington: UP of America, 1981. (textbook)
• Utopian Studies 1 (co-ed.). Lantham: UP of America, 1987. (conference proceedings)
• Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (ed.). New York: Modern Language Assoc., 1988.
• Native American Writers of the United States, ed., Vol. 175 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit; Gale Research, 1997.
• Michibata de Deatta Nippon [A Sidewalker’s Japan]. Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2002. (personal narrative)
• Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Utopia. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003.
• The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, co-ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Selected Articles / Chapters published in the United States

• "Survey Courses, Indian Literature, and The Way to Rainy Mountain." College English 37 (1976): 619-24.
• "Eyewitness to Utopia: Illustrations in Utopian Literature." Prospects: An Annual of American Culture Studies 4 (1979): 355-64 + 16 unnumbered pages of annotated illustrations.
• "H. G. Wells and the 'Momentary Voices' of a Modern Utopia." Extrapolation 23 (1982): 117-37.
• "Bear and Elk: The Nature(s) of Contemporary American Indian Poetry." Studies in American Indian Literature. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: Modern Language Assn., 1983. 178-91.
• "Native American Oral Narratives: Context and Continuity." Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Ed. Brian Swann. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 39-54.
• "Inventive Modeling: Rainy Mountain 's Way to Composition." College English 46 (1984): 767-82.
• "Technology, Culture, and Utopia: Gillette's Unity Regained." Technology and Culture 26 (1985): 560-70, cover.
• "Re-forming Reform: As History, Method, and Philosophy” [review essay] American Quarterly 39 (1987): 296-300.
• “The Heuristic Powers of Indian Literatures: What Native Authorship Does to Mainstream Texts." Studies in American Indian Literatures, Ser. 2, 3: 2 (1991): 8-21.
• "The Talking Porcupine Liberates Utopia: Le Guin's "Omelas" as Pretext to the Dance." Utopian Studies 2: 1 & 2 (1991): 6-18. [The featured article, published together with five responses.]
• "Contemporary American Indian Literature: The Centrality of Canons on the Margins" [review essay]. American Literary History 6.3 (1994): 583-99.
• "The Nightway Questions American Literature." American Literature 66 (1994): 817-29.
• "Indian Lives: The Defining, the Telling" [review essay]. American Quarterly 46 (1994): 81-91.
• "Utopian Literature. Empowering Students, and Gender Awareness." Science-Fiction Studies 23 (1996): 393-405.
• "Silko's Arroyos as Mainstream: Processes and Implications of Canonical Identity." Modern Fiction Studies 45.1 (1999): 10-37. (Lead article in special issue). Updated and condensed version in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony: A Case Book. Ed. Allan Chavkin. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 223-39.
• “Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere: Reception Studies and Utopian Literature.” American Reception Study: Reconsiderations and New Directions. Ed, James Machor and Philip Goldstein. New York: Oxford UP. 2008. 99-118.
• “Paradise Transformed: Varieties of Nineteenth-Century Utopias.” Ed. Gregory Claeys. The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. New York: Cambridge UP. 2010. 79-106.
• “It’s Not a Poem. It’s My Life: Navajo Singing Identities.” Studies in American Indian Literatures NS 24.2 (2012): 84-103.
• “Making Do: Momaday’s Survivance Ceremonies.” Studies in American Indian Literatures NS 24.4 (2012). 77-98.
• “Reverse Assimilation: Native Appropriations of Euro-American Conventions.” The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature. Ed. Deborah Madsen. New York: Routledge, 2016. 390-401.
• “Naming Native (Living) Histories: Erdrich’s Plague of Names.” Studies in American Fiction 43.1 (2016). 115-35.