Hello! I'm Ross Tangedal.
I have been Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Cornerstone Press at UWSP since 2016. I specialize in American print culture, publishing studies, textual editing, book history, and bibliography, with emphases on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Midwestern literature. My work has been published in South Atlantic Review, The Hemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Authorship, MidAmerica, and Midwestern Miscellany, and I have published essays in the Teaching Hemingway series (Kent State UP) and the Rediscovering the American Midwest series (Hastings College Press). My edition of Michigan author John Herrmann’s lost novel, Foreign Born, was published in 2018 (Hastings College Press), and I am a contributing editor for the multi-volume, NEH-funded Hemingway Letters Project (Cambridge UP), where I am associate editor of volume 6. I serve on the Executive Advisory Board of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and on the Advisory Council of Younger Scholars of the Ernest Hemingway Society. I am currently at work on two book projects: 1) Authorial Prefaces and American Writers since 1900; and 2) Editing the Harlem Renaissance (w/ Joshua Murray).
As an editor, I specialize in academic writing, proofreading/copy-editing in academic and non-academic fields, long and short form manuscripts (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, etc.), graduate school documents (dissertations, theses, conference papers, etc.), and professional writing (CVs, statements of purpose, cover letters).
EXPERIENCE
EDUCATION
WRITING, EDITING, PUBLISHING
PUBLICATIONS
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Edited Volumes
2021 Associate editor. The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (1934-1936). Edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale, and Robert W. Trogdon. Cambridge University Press [forthcoming].
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2019 The Wisconsin Idea. By Charles McCarthy. Edited by Ross K. Tangedal and Jeff Snowbarger. Cornerstone Press. 304 pp.
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2018 Foreign Born. By John Herrmann. Edited by Ross K. Tangedal. Hastings College Press. xxvii, 290 pp.
Journal Articles (refereed)
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2019 "I'm Inclined to Believe: Editing Uncertainty in the Ending(s) to Nella Larsen's Passing." South Atlantic Review [forthcoming].
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2017 “Alone and Alone: Defense, Justification, and Apology in Fitzgerald’s Late Prefaces.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 15, pp. 51-71.
2017 “Breaking Forelegs: Hemingway’s Early Prefaces.” Hemingway Review, vol. 37, no. 1, pp. 65-82.
2017 “Nothing is Left but the Sky: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Booth Tarkington, and Midwestern Influence.” Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 12-25.
2016 “Refusing the Serious: Authorial Resistance in Ring Lardner’s Prefaces for Scribner’s.” Authorship, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1-11.
2016 “‘At Last Everyone Had Something to Talk About’: Gloria’s War in Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned.” Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 44, pp. 68-81.
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2015 “My Own Personal Public: Fitzgerald’s Table of Contents in Tales of the Jazz Age.” F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 13, pp. 130-145.
2015 “Excuse the Preface: Hemingway’s Introductions for Other Writers.” Hemingway Review, vol. 34, no. 2,
pp. 72-90.
2014 “Designed to Amuse: Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring and Intertextual Comedy.” MidAmerica, vol. 41, pp. 11-22.
2012 “This Storm is What We Call Progress: Whitman, Kushner, and Transnational Crisis.” The Quint: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly from the North, vol. 5, no.1, pp. 74-88.
Book Chapters (refereed)
2018 “Hemingway’s Experts: Teaching Race in Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa.” Teaching Hemingway and Race. Edited by Gary Holcomb. Kent State UP, pp. 29–40.
2018 “That Time in Chicago: Midwestern Memory in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” A Scattering Time: How Modernism Met Midwestern Culture. Edited by Sara A. Kosiba. Hastings College Press, pp. 17–31.
2018 “A Few Practical Things: Death in the Afternoon and Hemingway’s Natural Pedagogy.” Teaching Hemingway and the Natural World. Edited by Kevin K. Maier. Kent State UP, pp. 178-191.
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EDITORIAL EXPERIENCE
Academic Presses & Projects
Contributing Editor, Hemingway Letters Project, Pennsylvania State University (2017-present)
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Journals
Volume Advisor, Children's Literature Review [forthcoming 2019]
Guest Editor, Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 45, no. 2, 2017 [Special Issue on F. Scott Fitzgerald]
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Book Series
Managing Editor, J. Baird Callicott Environmental Humanities Series, Wisconsin Idea Institute, Cornerstone Press (2018-present)
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PUBLISHING EXPERIENCE
Books Released
Suhr, Kim. Nothing to Lose. Cornerstone Press, 2018. 240 pp.
Jones, Clint. Ecological Reflections on Post-Capitalist Society. Callicott Series. Cornerstone Press, 2018. 120 pp.
Davis, Susanne. The Appointed Hour. Cornerstone Press, 2017. 176 pp.
Muslim, Kristine Ong, Meditations of a Beast. Cornerstone Press, 2016. 89 pp.
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ENGL 389 - BOOK HISTORY
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The primary goal of this course is to immerse students in the interdisciplinary field of book history. Students will study the book as object, the book as commerce, and the book as art in various ways. The course covers four major areas: 1) Authorship; 2) Print Culture; 3) Bibliography; and 4) Textual Criticism. Two course texts (The Broadview Reader in Book History; Bibliography & Textual Studies) and a course packet will provide students with an expansive yet detailed introduction to the field. Book history is one of the fastest growing intellectual fields in the world, with scholarship focused on everything from periodicals and books, to digital archives and the ethics of e-reading. Both exclusive and inclusive, the history of the book is the history of human thought, human commerce, human ingenuity, and human culture. By understanding the forces at work behind the scenes of literary art, as well as the resulting response that the art receives, students will be able to recognize the complex system at work each time they open a new book (or refresh their e-reader). We will focus largely on the machine-press period (1800-1950), though certain classes will be devoted to issues in the hand-press period (1500-1800). A truly interdisciplinary field, book history aims to understand material texts and culture from all angles, including religious, historical, theoretical, social, philosophical, archaeological, political, critical, and cultural viewpoints. Authors under examination include Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Susanna Rowson, Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, Toni Morrison, Nella Larsen, and William Shakespeare. We will discuss readers and writers, publishers and editors, bookbinders and bookmen, bibliography and print culture, textual editing and reading cultures…this course definitely has something for any student of literature. The book is not dead, the author is not dead (though some have claimed it), and the social life of texts, words, and print culture continues to show us who we are (and were) as human beings.
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ENGL 388 - EDITORIAL PROCESS
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The primary goal of this course is to immerse students in the field of editorial process. Students will study the field in various ways. The course covers three major areas: 1) Editorial Theory; 2) Textual Editing; and 3) Developmental Editing. A central course text (What Editors Do: The Art, Craft & Business of Book Editing), two case study novels (Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon, both published posthumously), and various essays will provide students with an expansive yet detailed introduction to the field. Editorial process is the science and art behind the craft of writing for publication, how rough manuscripts become books, and how books become pieces of history. By understanding the forces at work behind the scenes of writing, students will be able to recognize the complex system at work each time they open a new book. Editors, according to Max Perkins, do not create anything…they merely release energy and encourage potential. This course will interrogate the ways in which “editing” services readers, writers, and publishers, and how “editing” means more than correcting grammar and spelling. Several course projects will illuminate the complexities (and possibilities) inherent in editing. Many of the skills needed to be successful in the course translate well into academic and non-academic fields of employment.
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ENGL 350 - CREATIVE NONFICTION
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This course is designed to introduce students to the genre of creative nonfiction, both in theory and in practice. We will read major pieces of creative nonfiction, including works by Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Maclean, Rachel Carson, Michael Martone, and Rebecca Solnit. Students will produce various short creative pieces covering major approaches (true crime, travel, memoir, etc.), as well as a medium length publishable excerpt and a full length final piece. We will have read-arounds, writing workshops, peer reviews, and conferences as the semester progresses.
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ENGL 349 - EDITING AND PUBLISHING (Cornerstone Press)
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This course offers both an experiential learning opportunity within, and an immersive theoretical study of, the book publishing industry. As the staff of Cornerstone Press, you are responsible for the acquisition, editing, design, marketing, advertisement, sales, and promotion of a book from manuscript to finished product. We will also be analyzing two authors' relationships to the publishing industry (F. Scott Fitzgerald & Ernest Hemingway) in order to gain greater insight into the business of literary production. You will produce a number of small assignments/reports as the semester progresses, culminating in a final course project related to the field. While you will participate in a specific publishing role for Cornerstone Press based on both the skills you bring and those you wish to learn, you will also have the opportunity to participate individually and in group settings on duties such as manuscript selection, editing, designing, marketing, and selling both the final product and Cornerstone Press backlist titles. Skills you learn and practice in this course translate well to work in editing and publishing fields.
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EDITORIAL EXPERTISE
Along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, I have edited manuscripts in the fields below:
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Humanities
Psychology
Literature
Sociology
Music
History
Data Science
Human Resources
Business
Hospitality Management
International Studies
Law & Legal Studies
Philosophy
History of Science
Education
Art Therapy
Mathematics
Accounting
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Military History
Social Justice
Justice Studies
Trauma Theory
Health Sciences
Composition Studies
Economics
Civics & Government
Environmental Studies