Nicholas “Nick” Benson – Executive Director, Provost’s Office of Outreach & Engagement
Nick Benson shapes the university’s community development initiatives by leading outreach and engagement programming and services around community and economic development, sustainability, cultural vitality, health and wellness, and knowledge sharing. He enjoys engaging departments across the university and communities throughout the state in mutually beneficial partnerships that innovate on both the university’s public mission and the challenges facing Iowa’s cities and small towns. He earned both his master’s degree in urban planning and Juris Doctorate from the University of Iowa.
Stephanie M. Blalock – Digital Humanities Librarian, Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio
Stephanie Blalock’s research focuses on Walt Whitman and the artistic communities of antebellum New York. She is the Associate Editor of the Walt Whitman Archive and the interdisciplinary database The Vault at Pfaff’s. She is the author of Go to Pfaff’s: The History of a Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon, a peer-reviewed digital publication (2014), and “‘Tell what I meant by Calamus: Walt Whitman’s Vision of Comradeship from Fred Vaughan to the Fred Gray Association” in Whitman Among the Bohemians (2014).
Andrew Boge – Graduate Student, Department of Communication Studies
Andrew Boge’s academic and community commitments reside at the intersection of critical race studies, contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, and decolonial studies. He was a Humanities for the Public Good Intern in the summer of 2019, working at African American Museum of Iowa as a program researcher. He investigated the ethical dimensions of slavery education and drafted preliminary program designs for secondary education audiences. In addition to his departmental commitments, he serves on the CLAS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.
Sarah E. Bond – Associate Professor, Department of History
Sarah E. Bond is interested in late Roman history, topography and GIS, Digital Humanities, and the socio-legal experience of ancient marginal peoples. In addition to her book Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean (2016), she has won national recognition for her public scholarship that has appeared on Hyperallergic.com and in The Chronical of Higher Education, The New York Times, and Forbes. Follow her on Twitter @SarahEBond or read her blog.
Luke Borland – Graduate Student, Department of History
Luke Borland’s work focuses on youth labor service programs in the United States and Nazi Germany during the Great Depression. He utilizes digital humanities methods to expand opportunities for engagement and has partnered with museums to create content that allow communities to explore the intimate ways their homes have been shaped by these programs. A part of his commitment to community education within and beyond the walls of academe, he spent time in AmeriCorps prior to coming to Iowa.
Victoria “Torie” Burns – Graduate Student, Department of English
Torie Burns studies 20th and 21st-century American literature and digital humanities; exploring the relationships between gender, the personal, and (dis)embodiment in life writing. She directed an Iowa Youth Writing Project camp that culminated in a month-long exhibition of disembodied self-portraits at a local arts organization. She served as the graduate assistant for the Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry program (2018) and the Humanities for the Public Good program (2019/2020). Before entering graduate school, she worked for two years at Vanderbilt University’s business school.
Caroline Cheung– Graduate Student, Department of English
Caroline Cheung works at the intersections of women of color feminisms, theories of state violence, political discourses and prison abolition. Believing that creative and imaginative work – which are the purview of humanities education – serve as revolutionary gestures, she commits herself to publicly engaged scholarship, critical collaboration, and informed activism. Her graduate research is committed to language’s affirmative and disruptive potentials in systems of oppression, and further informed the broad scope of language use and its socio-political applications.
Liz Crooks – Director, Pentacrest Museums
Liz Crooks oversees the education, research and engagement missions of the University as director of the UI Natural History Museum & The Old Capitol. She holds graduate degrees in museum studies and book arts. She has a long administrative career in the university’s Graduate College and Center for Human Rights. She has also been involved in the Iowa City Community School District Board of Directors, the Museum Studies Program Advisory Committee and the Iowa Museum Association Board of Directors.
David Cunning – Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy
David Cunning’s research and teaching focus on early modern philosophy. He has published primarily on Descartes, Cavendish, Spinoza, and Hume. In his six years as Director of Graduate Studies, he worked on a number of initiatives including: assisting graduate students in the revision of papers for conference submission or publication, providing guidance on the application of philosophical training to careers outside of academia, and helping students to locate pedagogical resources to excel in the classroom.
Anny-Dominique Curtius – Associate Professor, Department of French & Italian
Anny-Dominique Curtius’s interdisciplinary commitments circulate the crossroads of Francophone studies, Postcolonial ecocriticism, and the intangible cultural heritage in the Global South and UNESCO. She is the author of Symbioses d’une mémoire: Manifestations religieuses et littératures de la Caraïbe, (2006) and the forthcoming Suzanne Césaire, Archéologie littéraire et artistique sur une mémoire empêchée (2020). Her current book in progress focuses on slavery museums and memorials and postcolonial and ecocritical narrativization of trauma and memory.
Roxanna Curto – Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Departments of French & Italian, Spanish & Portuguese
Roxanna Curto explores cultures of technology and sport in literature from the French and Spanish-speaking worlds. She authored Inter-tech(s): Colonialism and the Question of Technology in Francophone Literature (2016); further publishing journal articles on Aimé Césaire and Latin American literature, as well as the role of technology in the work of 20th-Century French poets. Her second book project is entitled, Writing Sport: The Stylistics and Politics of Athletic Movement in French and Francophone Literature.
Kimberly Datchuk – Curator of Learning & Engagement, Stanley Museum of Art
Kimberly Datchuk connects the University’s vibrant arts culture and history to daily campus life and classroom instruction across colleges. She holds a PhD in art history with a specialty in nineteenth-century European art. Her current research and curatorial interests include institutional critique, technology, gender, and sexuality in fin-de-siècle France. She has presented her research on art history and arts education at international conferences in France, England, Poland and the United States.
Cate Dicharry – Director, Carver College of Medicine Writing and Humanities Program
Cate Dicharry facilitates the humanistic and artistic dimensions of medical education and practice by taking a critical, transdisciplinary approach to the humanities and arts in the context of medical school. Prior to her current appointment, she developed programs for the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She authored The Fine Art of Fucking Up (2015), and her writing has appeared in Electric Literature and Literary Hub among others. She discovered a love for creative writing while teaching English internationally.
Anna L. Bostwick Flaming – Associate Director, Office of Teaching, Learning & Technology’s Center for Teaching
Anna L. Bostwick Flaming leads the Center for Teaching’s faculty and TA development across campus and provides direct support through consultations, workshops and other programming. She has launched and directed a variety of initiatives including the Early Career Faculty Academy and the Course Design Institute. She is chair-elect of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education’s Scholarship Committee, which supports the POD Network’s strategic goal of “advancing evidence-based practice.”
Eric Gidal – Professor, Department of English
Eric Gidal teaches courses in poetry, aesthetics, literature and the visual arts during the eighteenth-century and romantic-eras. His authored Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (2015), which explores a modern quest to locate vestiges of ancient poetry in the landscapes of an industrial world. He has also published on museums, melancholy and social theory, romantic climatology, and the writings of Mme de Staël. He is currently researching the relations between literature, industrial space, and environmental history.
Michaela Hoenicke-Moore – Associate Professor, Department of History
Michaela Hoenicke-Moore researches the relationship between US-American foreign policy, and the European responses to ‘America’ as a democracy and a world power. Her first book Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 (2010) won the 2010 Myrna F. Bernath Book Award. She has taught internationally at the Kennedy Institute in Berlin and York University in Toronto. She was also a senior fellow in US Foreign Policy at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin (1999-2001).
Joni Kinsey – Professor, School of Art & Art History
Joni Kinsey’s research includes nineteenth-century landscape painting and art of the American West and Midwest, with broader interests in popular prints and women artists in the central U.S. In addition to teaching in these subject areas, she has also designed and implemented coursework in museum theory and practice. She was a Fulbright Fellow in the United Kingdom (2014) and she is continuing to work on a project from that experience, entitled Thomas Moran’s Britain: Transatlantic Visions of “The American Turner.”
Brady Krien – Graduate Student, Department of English; School of Library & Information Science; Graduate College
Brady Krien currently works in the Graduate College facilitating diverse career exploration and preparation for nationally competitive grants and fellowships. He has served in official fellowship capacities in the Rhetoric Department’s Professional Development Program; the Center for Teaching; and the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research, and Learning. He is a contributing author at Inside Higher Ed’s GradHacker blog where he writes about issues related to graduate education, professional development, and teaching.
Gordon Louie – Graduate Student, Department of Educational policy & Leadership Studies
Gordon Louie’s work broadly examines the internationalization of higher education, ways of ‘being’ in difference and communicating across difference in educational contexts, and ways of integrating games-based learning in pedagogical practice. Prior to his current studies in education, his former academic training was in public history and focused primarily on historic preservation and engaging wider audiences in academic research. He hopes to build more sustainable bridges between research, practice, and public engagement.
Lindsay Mattock – Associate Professor and Associate Director, School of Library & Information Science
Lindsay Mattock’s work focuses on the archival practices of non-institutional archival spaces including collectives and community archives. Her ongoing digital project Mapping the Independent Media Community traces historical social networks amongst artists and institutions; and how they shaped contemporary archival praxis. She works to break the traditional boundaries between community and academy, recognizing the value of open dialog that is open and accessible to the full diversity of our communities. She looks forward to engaging doctoral education and community-engaged praxis across the humanities.
Jesus “Chuy” Renteria – Public Engagement Coordinator, Hancher Auditorium
Chuy Renteria is an author, dancer, storyteller, and teacher. He is published in We the Interwoven: An Anthology of Bicultural Iowa (2019) and is working on his first full-length book about growing up in Iowa’s first majority Hispanic town. His performance background and equitable community advocacy work for individuals with special needs has led him to his current role at Hancher. He also teaches at the North Liberty studio All the Way Up.
Chad Rhym – Graduate Student, Department of Sociology & Criminology
Chad Rhym’s scholarly interests center race and ethnicity, social inequality and political sociology. He has conducted research on education inequality as a Summer Research Opportunity Program Fellow at the University’s Social and Education Policy Research Center. During his undergraduate career at Morehouse College, he was a photojournalism intern at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a photojournalism fellow with The New York Times Student Journalism Institute, and an HBCU Digital Media Fellow at the Online News Association.
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez – Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez‘s research explores a variety of topics including Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean, women’s writing, and the Asian Spanish empire. She authored Letras liberadas. Cautiverio, escritura y subjetividad en el de la época imperial Española (2013) and she is currently writing a monograph about the Philippines Spanish colonial rule. She was Chair of the Faculty Assembly of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2016-2017. In 2015 she received the University of Iowa M.L. Huit Faculty Award.
Jennifer Teitle – Assistant Dean for Graduate Development and Postdoctoral Affairs, Graduate College
Jennifer Teitle’s seminars and discussions focus on strategies for career preparation, grant writing skills, and work-life balance. Her work has helped individuals find fulfilling careers in academia, industry, government, and the non-profit sector. Jen advocates for graduate education nationally, as part of the ImaginePhD team and through the Graduate Careers Consortium. She holds a PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture and has 10 years of experience in Higher Education Administration.
Deborah Whaley – Professor, Department of American Studies; Program in African American Studies
Deborah Whaley is an artist, curator and writer who has published original art, award-winning poetry, and articles on social movements, popular culture, and the fine arts. She authored Black Women in Sequence: Reinking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015) and Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (2010). Her current research examines dissociate identities as a narrative trope in popular culture with a particular focus on Latinx, White, Asian/American, and Black women in a transnational framework.
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams – Associate Professor, School of Art & Art History; Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies; Office of the Ombuds
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams is an artist and teacher whose work focuses on women’s issues, community, art, and people who are incarcerated. Her graphic scholarship has been published by the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, and the International Journal of Comic Art. Her current projects include a graphic novel about the Detroit Race Riots of 1943, a novella about Mary Turner, and stories about working in women’s prisons.
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