Office: 360 EPB Phone: 319-335-0449 E-Mail: Barbara-Eckstein@uiowa.edu An Endangered River Runs through Us Curriculum Vitae Selected Publications/Projects Courses

Barbara Eckstein

Literature, Space, and Place
Director of Graduate Studies in English

Barbara Eckstein has recently published two books that address the interaction of storytelling and the production of urban spaces.  Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities (2003), co-edited with James Throgmorton of the Urban Planning program at the University of Iowa, is available from MIT Press.  Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (2005) is available from Routledge. That a book of this topic, seven years in the making, should appear in the fall of 2005 serves as poignant testimony both to the longevity of New Orleans's problems and of its strategies for survival as a place.

She has now turned her research interest to the liminal role of foremen in the steel industry in Canton, a deindustrializing city of northeastern Ohio. A project which uses and produces oral histories, it is also an inchoate international one. She is connecting with scholars in and of England, Germany, India and other sites who share her interest in the liminality of foremen in the steel industry.

Her teaching interests include the role of literature in the production of places;the significance of geographic scale as a tool of textual, material and ideological interpretation; and, more recently the literature and oral histories of U.S. veterans. The last provides an opportunity to engage students in service learning.