KENNETH M. ROEMER (B.A., Harvard; M.A., Ph. D., Univ. of Pennsylvania), a Piper Professor of 2011, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Distinguished Scholar Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, has received four NEH grants to direct Summer Seminars and has been a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow and a Visiting Professor in Japan. He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard and has lectured at twelve universities in Japan and in Vienna, Lisbon, Hong Kong, Montpellier, Dresden, and several cities in Italy, Brazil, Ireland, Canada, and Turkey. He was one of only three Americans selected to co-chair a seminar at the 2008 European Alpbach Forum in Austria. He is past President of the Society for Utopian Studies, founding Editor of Utopus Discovered, past Vice President and founding member of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL), and past Chair of the American Indian Literatures and Late 19th- Early 20th-Century Divisions of the Modern Language Association (MLA). He has been Managing Editor of American Literary Realism (ALR) and Assistant Editor of American Quarterly. He serves on the Editorial Boards of Utopian Studies, SAIL, and ALR. He has served on the Advisory Board of PMLA and the Editorial Board of American Literature. His articles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Technology and Culture, Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL), and Utopian Studies. MLA published his Approaches to Teaching Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain(ed.); his Native American Writers of the United States (ed.) won a Writer of Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. He has written four books on utopian literature: The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings (which was nominated for a Pulitzer in American History by the Editor of the NY Times/Arno Press Utopian Literature Collection), America as Utopia (ed.), Build Your Own Utopia, and Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Nowhere. Favorable reviews of his scholarly books have appeared in academic journals, as well as the Chronicle of Higher Education and the [London] Times Literary Supplement. His collection of personal narratives, verse, and photography about Japan is entitled Michibata de Deatta Nippon (A Sidewalker's Japan). His co-edited Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature won a Writer of the Year Award from Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 2008 he received the Lyman Tower Sargent Distinguished Scholarship Award for lifetime achievement in scholarship, teaching, and service from the Society for Utopian Studies; in 2010 the Society named its teaching award after him. For nineteen years he has been a Faculty Advisor for the Native American Students Association at UT Arlington. In 2011 he was named a Piper Professor (state-wide award), and he received one of the UT System’s Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Awards. In 2014 he was one of five UT System professors seleted for the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers.





  • 1971 - PhD in American Civilization, The University of Pennsylvania
  • 1968 - MA in American Civilization, The University of Pennsylvania
  • 1967 - BA in English - honors, Harvard University

Link to Research Profile
Office: 405 Carlisle Hall
roemer@uta.edu

Collections in this community

Recent Submissions

View more