Evelyn Funda

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

English

Evelyn Funda is Associate Professor of English and author of the memoir Weeds, which situates the history of her Czech immigrant family’s tenure on a small farm in Idaho within the national context of agricultural history. Reviewed in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Kirkus, and Booklist, the book has been called “moving,” “penetrating,” “tender,” “an intensely American story,” that “grapples with complicated questions” and “stands among the very best works in the genre [of ecocritical memoir].” Novelist and memoirist Mary Clearman Blew says that it “is written with a scholar’s exactitude and a daughter’s heart.” Weeds was also named winner of the David W. & Beatrice C. Evans Handcart Award for Biography by the Mountain West Center.

Additionally, Funda is co-author of the textbook Farm: A Multimodal Reader, which offers a college-level, interdisciplinary, humanities-based, agricultural curriculum that could be used in general education or humanities courses. She is currently at work on a book of literary criticism entitled Willa Cather and the Czechs, an in-depth study of the novelist’s engagement with Czech culture, art, history, music, and literature. Essays from that book have already been published or are forthcoming in Cather Studies, the most-prestigious journal on Cather studies.