Faculty Books 

In the wake of a catastrophic two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break: For three months she would abstain from dating, relationships, and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? 

But to Febos, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship after another with men and women. As she puts it, she could trace a “daisy chain of romances” from her adolescence to her midthirties. Finally, she would carve out time to focus on herself and examine the patterns that had produced her midlife disaster. 

Over those first few months, she gleaned insights into her past and awoke to the joys of being single. She decided to extend her celibacy, not knowing it would become the most fulfilling and sensual year of her life. No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, she learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the distinct pleasures unmediated by lovers, and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. Bringing her own experiences into conversation with those of women throughout history—from eleventh-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, Virginia Woolf, and Octavia Butler to the Shakers and Sappho—Febos situates her story within a newfound lineage of role models who unapologetically pursued their ambitions and ideals.

Donika Kelly

Associate Professor

The Natural Order of Things

(Graywolf Press, 2025)

Donika Kelly’s poetry is known for its resonant, unflinching confrontations with trauma and inheritance, translated through myth and nature. The Natural Order of Things expands these explorations into a new realm: one defined by joy and connection. It is an ode to companionship with people, animals, and our planet, and reveals the reparative power of intimacy. In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships. Though it once seemed impossible, she realizes a surprising place for herself, a rightness in the larger world.

Kathy Lavezzo

Professor

Bad Medievalism and the Modernity Problem

(Fordham Press, 2025)

Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medi­evalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scholars typically accept is a fiction that has shaped racial discourse over a longue durée. The hard line drawn between “then” and “now” is of a piece with the line separating whiteness from humans deemed irrevocably other. Thus, Lavezzo advocates a “bad”—that is, depressing and disturbing, even nau­seating—historicism attuned to the interpenetration of race, whiteness, and periodicity in the “west.”

David Wittenberg

Professor

Big Culture: Towards an Aesthetics of Magnitude

(University of Chicago Press, 2025)

Big Culture asks a simple question: why do big things give us big feelings? Skyscrapers, disasters, and other large phenomena can elicit fear, attraction, and awe. David Wittenberg argues that these feelings cannot be explained through objects’ size alone. Instead, he contends that an encounter with bigness is a primal, even violent sensation like little else that we experience in our well-proportioned adult lives.

Matthew P. Brown

Associate Professor

The Novel and the Blank: A Literary History of the Book Trades in 18th Century British America

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025)

In The Novel and the Blank, Matthew P. Brown uncovers the vibrant, overlooked world of the eighteenth-century British American print shop. Printing more than just novels and pamphlets, these workshops produced a kaleidoscope of printed materials—from legal blanks and almanacs to runaway slave ads and chapbooks — that reflected the complexities of colonial life. 

William Rhodes

Assistant Professor

The Work of Reform: Literature and Political Ecology from Langland to Spenser

(Cornell University Press, 2025)

The Work of Reform interweaves literary, economic, and environmental history to trace the influence that William Langland's harsh vision of enforced agrarian labor in Piers Plowman had on later medieval and early modern thinking about land and improvement in Britain and Ireland, culminating with Edmund Spenser's colonial writing. William Rhodes brings together a rich poetic archive with agrarian husbandry manuals, prose polemics, and imperial tracts to connect conflicts over land and labor on the English manor to those of Tudor Ireland, offering a new eco-Marxist literary history of ecological transformation across the medieval-modern divide.

David Gooblar

Associate Professor

One Classroom at a Time

(Harvard University Press, 2025)

A century ago, a typical US college campus was a sanctuary of privilege, with white men of means constituting nearly the entire student population. Today, half of US undergraduates live at or near the poverty line, and universities are more diverse than ever. But teaching and curricula have not caught up, resulting in stark inequities. One Classroom at a Time provides practical, research-based recommendations for teachers and administrators who want to narrow such academic gaps. David Gooblar explains the psychological hardships facing many marginalized students—including stereotype threat and belonging uncertainty—and provides detailed remedies. This wide-ranging guide also offers advice for mitigating burdens of financial insecurity and designing classes that work for all students regardless of disabilities. The emphasis throughout is on helping instructors and administrators understand not just the principles of equitable pedagogy but also the reasoning; not just what works, but why it works.

Books by Staff & Alumni

Alicia Wright

Managing Editor, The Iowa Review

You’re Called by the Same Sound

(Thirdhand Books, 2025)

You’re Called by the Same Sound is a reckoning, a confrontation, and a visionary meditation that interleaves private grief with public lament. In this book, Alicia Wright dredges a family archive in response to histories of devastation in northwest Georgia and the American South. Her flinty lyrics inventory and seek to resist a legacy of despoliation, warning that history is a “murky churn” in which our collective reflection is crystal clear.

Mike Chasar ed.

PhD, 2007

The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs

(Bloomsbury, 2025)

Through short essays, leading poetry critics and Bob Dylan experts analyze songs from a range of perspectives to illuminate the songs' poetic and literary character.

An innovative resource for Bob Dylan fans and scholars alike, these thirty essays by leading scholars of poetry, music, and literature illustrate how and why the work of the 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate is in fact so literary. Examining how Dylan's lyrics shape or get shaped by vocalization, performance, instrumentation, film, recording technologies, and the forces of history unfolding around him, this collection models a range of ways to understand the songs as poetical phenomena by answering questions like: How can we read and understand Dylan's lyrics as poetry? How do those lyrics build on, dialogue with, and expand the poetic tradition? How does Dylan's style change over time while both pushing and responding to changes in the world of popular music? Collecting archival research, close reading, musical analysis, and various modes of cultural criticism under one cover, The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs stakes a claim to Dylan's central place in the history of American poetry. The collection includes a contribution from Professor Loren Glass on Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35.” 

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