New Faculty
Tom Lin joins the English department as an Assistant Professor.
“I’m most excited about getting to know everyone, students and faculty alike! Everyone has been so welcoming and wonderful and full of tips for how to survive my first Midwestern winter.” - Tom Lin
Tom Lin is author of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Little, Brown, 2021), which won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Northern California Book Reviewers’ Award in Fiction. His scholarly research investigates the role of science fiction and popular culture in the shaping of large technical systems, using a hybrid approach that draws from the intersection of the history of technology and literary studies. His current projects include a new novel, forthcoming in 2026, as well as a project engaging American nuclear tourism.
During the 2025 spring semester, Lin will teach a fiction workshop, and a course titled, “How to Sell Out,” focusing on how we write about the corporate form, the ways that companies have come to mediate our lives, and what it means to spend a life working for a corporation. One of his goals while at the University of Iowa is to establish an interdisciplinary science and technology studies group to talk and think about the coproduction of culture and technology and working across disciplinary boundaries to make sense of how we got here and where we’re headed.
Pia Struzzieri joins the English department as an Adjunct Assistant Professor.
“This semester, I have been really impressed by my students and how eager they are to read and learn, in Interpretation of Literature and in Foundations of Creative Writing. So one thing I'm excited about every day is the opportunity to talk about what we've read together. More generally, living in Iowa City and being around so many people who are writing, creating, and reading has been so exciting, both because it's a great environment in which to teach and because exposure to this community makes a daily writing practice feel so natural.” - Pia Struzzieri
Pia Struzzieri is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English. She earned her MFA in Fiction at Columbia University and an AB in Literary Arts and Modern Culture/Media at Brown University. In the 2025 spring semester, she will be teaching Interpretation of Literature and "Strange Shapes," where students will read, discuss, and write fiction that takes unconventional forms while searching for an answer to the question, “When fiction takes on a new shape, experimenting with elements of interactivity, time, chance, images, or space, what happens to the stories themselves?” Struzzieri hopes to read and write often while trying new things and taking advantage of opportunities to hear her favorite authors read their work.
Thomas Mira y Lopez joins the English department as a Visiting Assistant Professor with a focus on translation.
“[I am excited for] the freedom to create courses I am passionate and care deeply about, and then to share that material with brilliant, inquisitive students who challenge and reshape the material of that course with their ideas, insights, and experiences. Each semester is a collective venture, each semester changes the way I think and what I think and, though it might be cliche to say that I learn more from my students than they learn from me, there's a reason cliches are often true.” - Thomas Mira y Lopez
Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of The Book of Resting Places (Counterpoint Press, 2017). He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona and is an editor of Territory, a literary project about maps, as well as a fiction editor at DIAGRAM. He translates from Brazilian Portuguese and is originally from New York.
One of his goals in teaching is to make students more aware of the affinities between creative writing and translation and the ways in which they inform one another. During the 2025 spring semester, Mira y Lopez will be teaching a class on doubles and doppelgangers in literature and film, and “Speculative Fiction in Translation,” where students read several contemporary examples of global speculative fiction before attempting their own intralingual translations to draw out and better appreciate the translator's task. Additionally, he is developing a class for the 2025 fall semester on Revisionist Westerns, which will look at ways the genre has been complicated and expanded recently, while broadening students’ scope to a Pan-American focus rather than just the western US. His hope is for students to read more globally, to read more works in translation, and to more fully consider the processes behind those works.
New Staff
Alicia Wright joins the University of Iowa as the Managing Editor for The Iowa Review.
“I’m looking forward to having a deep relationship to the character of The Iowa Review not just as a casual or former graduate student reader, but in understanding from an editorial perspective how its history has shaped contemporary literature since it began in 1970, and seeing how decisions that are made now are part of today’s literary production.” - Alicia Wright
Alicia Wright is the editor of Annulet, a literary journal, and Annulet Editions, a new small independent press. Her poetry appears in The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Ecotone, among others, and her debut poetry collection, You're Called By The Same Sound, is forthcoming in 2025 from Third Hand Books.
As the Managing Editor, Wright will assist editor Lynne Nugent by sending contracts to recently accepted authors, going through rounds of intricate copy editing, or helping with reading submissions. Additionally, she will begin working with undergraduate interns this coming spring. Her primary goal is to uphold The Iowa Review’s excellence—everything from line-editing to amplifying the journal’s presence on the literary-cultural stage—and to incorporate her experience as a literary critic by contributing book reviews.
“I seek to become a better editor, one of clarifying acumen and inspired understanding, with every read, decision, or dialogue I have, whether that’s with an author, an accepted piece, the Chicago Manual of Style, or my brilliant colleagues serving on our masthead.” - Alicia Wright
Tara Atkinson joins the English department as the Graduate Program Coordinator.
“My favorite thing has to be just seeing all of the great thinking and writing that comes from the department’s students and faculty. I get to be surrounded by my favorite things all day long.” - Tara Atkinson
Tara is a UI English alum and former Iowa Review intern, and she joined the department last month as a Graduate Program Coordinator, after two years in the same role in Political Science. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington.
Atkinson moved from the political science department and to the English department in February of 2024. As a GPC, she answers admissions questions, manages registration for grad students, files forms for exams and fellowships, and provides information to faculty and grad students about program and college policies. She meets regularly with other staff about TA assignments and the course catalog, sends out a monthly newsletter, and updates the department’s website. Her goal as a GCP is to ensure a smooth workflow for grad students and their faculty, but she would “also like to be in English longer than anyone else has ever been and receive an honorary title like ‘Queen of EPB.’”
April Schaefer joins the English department as an Administrative Services Coordinator for the Nonfiction Writing Program.
"I am very honored I get the opportunity to be a part of the Nonfiction Writing Program and work with the incredible faculty and students here. Everyone has been so welcoming and wonderful to be around, and I am looking forward to all the amazing experiences ahead." - April Schaefer
April Schaefer studied at the University of Iowa and graduated with a BFA in dance. After graduating, she went into teaching before deciding to switch career paths. Now, she joins the Nonfiction Writing Program as the Administrative Services Coordinator. Schaefer hopes to contribute her past experience to this new position while learning from the NWP team.
Retiring Faculty
Florence Boos retires as a Professor in the English Department.
“Most of all, I will miss talking about Victorian texts in detail with my students. Sharing something that we all find important makes the past new, as it were, but more meaningful because it collapses different moments in time.” - Florence Boos
Florence Boos joined the English Department in 1972 upon receiving her PhD from the University of Wisconsin. Over the past fifty years she has offered a range of courses centered on British and transimperial literature 1830-1940, with an emphasis on poetry, nonfiction prose, working-class writing, feminism, and the social, political, and cultural contexts of literature. She has written and edited several books on the poet, artist, and socialist William Morris, and is the founder and editor of the William Morris Archive. In recent years her teaching has included courses in critical theory and its social implications, leading to discussion of such issues as race/critical race theory, transimperialism, ethics, the environment, animal rights, and gender theory. She served on more than a hundred fifty graduate comprehensive examination committees and supervised sixty completed doctoral dissertations. Both in teaching and writing, she aimed to present the works of members of previously marginalized groups, as well as pay tribute to the many profound and enduring insights offered in British and transimperial literature of the period.
Deborah Whaley retires as a Professor in the English department.
“What stands out in all of my courses are the students. I am lucky to teach and learn from brilliant, creative, and curious minds.” - Deborah Whaley
Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, poet, vegan blogger, and Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. From 2017-2020, she served as Senior Scholar for Digital Arts and Humanities for the UI Digital Studio, where she was an ambassador and liaison for the digital humanities, as well as director of the Public Digital Humanities graduate certificate. Then, she was an administrative fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Office of the Dean, where she focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and faculty development. Whaley was co-curator, with Kembrew McLeod, of the University of Iowa Museum of Art exhibition, "Two Turntables and a Microphone: Hiphop Contexts Featuring Harry Allen's Part of the Permanent Record; Photos From the Previous Century," and she has served as a consultant or feature writer for exhibitions on Black popular music and Black sequential art. In 2018, Whaley was nominated for a Rhysling Poetry Award for her long verse poem "Whispers and Lies" published in the 2018 Bram Stoker Award Finalist book Sycorax's Daughters.
Q&A with Boos and Whaley:
What is one of your most memorable moments of your time teaching in the University of Iowa’s English department and why?
Boos:
I was fortunate to be able to teach at the University of Iceland on a Fulbright Fellowship, and to participate in exchanges in both Denmark and France (three times at the Université Paul Valéry). In each country the students, curricula, and even the structure of education itself were quite different from those in the others. My husband Bill loved languages (he learned all three), and we had many memorable conversations with those in each country. A radical break with home is also liberating, freeing one to see one’s past life from a distance and attempt reorientation.
Whaley:
There are many memorable moments but one most recent was last Spring semester of 2024 when my Stuart Hall course hosted a symposium titled "Addressing the Crisis". We had a graduate student mentoring lunch, two keynotes that discussed how their art and public policy enacts change, and a panel of students who showcased their digital films made in previous semesters.
Is there one class you taught that stood out to you? Why?
Boos:
I’d hate to choose just one. At its best, teaching is a conversation, and in many cases students have become friends. I still keep up with several former students from the 1970s and 80s, as well as more recent ones.
For many years I’ve held a Victorian/Modernist reading group with the purpose of preparing doctoral students for their comprehensive exams. Over time this has evolved into a more flexible institution, as we analyze material congenial to each cohort. More recently, we’ve met by Zoom during the summers to discuss novels such as Bleak House, Middlemarch, and A Passage to India. It’s instructive to see how each text seems relevant to a new generation of graduate students, and it’s fun to share something voluntary with no need for grading.
In past years, the department’s graduate program was larger, and I enjoyed my relationship with Ph.D. students from abroad—from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, Thailand, French-speaking Canada, Egypt, and Palestine. These were all impressive human beings, and I learned a great deal from hearing their thoughts, and in some cases, from reading their published writings.
Whaley:
I have two favorite courses that I have taught out of the English Department: a graduate course on the theorist Stuart Hall and cultural studies and a course titled "Pop Goes the Mind: Mental (Un)Wellness in Popular Literature and Culture". In the Stuart Hall course students write op-eds for publication, create digital stories, and do podcasts. In the mental wellness course we have intellectually stimulating conversations about some of the best novels written about the subject from very diverse authors, and students do original research, write scripts, and create short films. What stands out in all of my courses are the students. I am lucky to teach and learn from brilliant, creative, and curious minds.
What are your plans after retiring from your position? What are you most looking forward to?
Boos:
I hope to spend part of the year in British Columbia near my son Eugene and part in Iowa City near friends and the university. My first goal is to finish my book on Morris’s later writings, drawing together the two dozen articles I’ve published on related topics.
If possible, I’d also like to begin on a memoir, placing my life in the context of wider events and paying tribute to some of those I remember with gratitude.
Whaley:
I am moving to Kansas City, KS to start a new job as chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Kansas. I am looking forward to living in a vibrant, diverse city and working to help build up a great department.
What will you miss?
Boos:
I’ll miss my colleagues. Listening to gifted speakers share their views—even when one disagrees—is a privilege. We also all implicitly share a conviction of the need for literature and inquiry in a fractured and commodified world.
Most of all, I will miss talking about Victorian texts in detail with my students. Sharing something that we all find important makes the past new, as it were but more meaningful because it collapses different moments in time.
Whaley:
What I will miss most about English are the students, intellectual community, and my colleagues who are the nation’s most brilliant scholars and researchers who care deeply about students and transformative pedagogy.