Marilee Lindemann

Marilee Lindemann, associate professor of English, is a scholar of American literature and an administrator who has spent much of her career at Maryland building and/or running programs that advance and make meaningful for students the university’s commitments to diversity and inclusive excellence. She served as Director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program from 2002 to 2014. As founding director, she designed the overall curriculum and developed an extensive course list, expanded enrollments, and helped to establish DC Queer Studies, a highly successful queer studies coalition among area universities, faculty, and students. From 2014 to 2026, she served as Executive Director of College Park Scholars, an academic residential community for selected freshmen and sophomores who matriculate into one of 13 interdisciplinary programs. Under her leadership, Scholars secured new investments from sponsoring colleges of programs and from the campus to advance goals aligned with the University’s strategic plan. Lindemann also oversaw a significant refresh of the Scholars brand and the addition of two programs. In 2024-25, CIVICUS, sponsored by the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, joined Scholars with a new name, Civic Engagement for Social Good, and the College of Information established a brand new program, Data Justice. In her final year, Lindemann helped secure the single largest gift in Scholars history, a $100,000 endowed fund established by Scholars alums Hart and Melissa Rossman. The fund will support scholarships for students participating in applied learning experiences such as internships, research, service-learning, and study abroad.

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), editor of The Cambridge Companion to Willa Cather (Cambridge UP, 2005), and co-editor, with Ann Romines, of Cather Studies 14: Unsettling Cather (U of Nebraska P, 2024). 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 blogs, Roxie’s World and The Madwoman with a Laptop, were projects of creative nonfiction that 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 the Michael Lynch Service Award from the Gay/Lesbian/Queer Caucus of the Modern Language Association (2007), Maryland’s W. E. Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award (2013), and the Medal of Freedom and Liberation from UMD’s President’s Commission on LGBT Issues (2014) in recognition of her efforts in building the LGBT Studies Program.