My research focuses on racial, ethnic, and regional identities, and way those identities got expressed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. I am particularly interested in the relationship between regional identities like Yankee and Southerner and “racial” identities like Anglo-Saxon, Negro, Celt, and Teuton.

Aron Aji, Director of MFA in Literary Translation, joined the faculty in 2014. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers. He leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature.

Kaveh Akbar teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

I have taught at the University of Iowa since 1973, with semesters abroad as an exchange professor in France, Iceland, and Denmark. Over the years I’ve offered a range of courses centered on British and transimperial literature 1830-1940, with an emphasis on poetry, nonfiction prose, and the social, political, and cultural contexts of literature.

I teach literary and cultural history, with a courtesy appointment in the UI Center for the Book. Offering an MFA degree and a Graduate Certificate, the Center combines the study of book history with the production of book art. My particular research interest is in the history of readership, as reflected in my book The Pilgrim and the Bee: Reading Rituals and Book Culture in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

I teach, research, and write about 20th and 21st century drama, theater, performance art, and media. In my current book project, Act without Words: Speechless Performance on Modern Stages, I examine why and how the concept of a “language” of gesture has attracted theater artists, writers, and theorists disenchanted with the capacity of spoken and written language to represent human experience.

Dr. Tara Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800. She received her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Political Science from Barnard College.

I'm an Associate Professor in both the Department of English and the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature; I'm also the current Director of the Institute for Cinema and Culture, and serve on the executive boards of the Program in Sexuality Studies and International Programs.

In 1998 I graduated from the University of Iowa with MFAs in both poetry and nonfiction, and then in 2005 I returned to Iowa to join the faculty of The Nonfiction Writing Program. Since arriving, I have developed the program’s four core graduate courses: “History of the Essay,” “The Essay Prize,” “Performance and Profession,” and “Thesis Workshop.”

Melissa Febos is the author of four books, including the memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), which Terry Gross called “fascinating” and Kirkus Reviews said “expertly captures grace within depravity,” and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a best book of 2017.

Claire F. Fox is M. F. Carpenter Professor of English and holds a complimentary appointment in Spanish & Portuguese. Her current research focuses on visual culture, performance, and placemaking in the Americas.

I teach courses in environmental literary studies, public humanities, and European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with emphases in media studies, information theory, and environmental history. I am also the editor of Philological Quarterly.

My research and teaching focus on literature and culture of the twentieth- and twenty-first century United States, with a particular interest in literary modernism broadly conceived.

I like to say that I teach about writing and I write about teaching, but I actually teach, and write, about a bunch of stuff. My other interests include feminism and systems of oppression, higher education and social justice, and twentieth-century American literature. I plan to teach and write about all of these subjects. 

Naomi Greyser is associate professor of American Studies, English and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, as well as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry.

My work involves interrogations of fiction, biography, science, science fiction, and the ethics of writing about other people, animals, and things.  My novels include Reproduction, Trinity and Speak. Reproduction (Ecco, 2023), the story of a woman attempting to write a novel about Mary Shelley, then turning, instead, to write a contemporary Frankenstein, will be published in June.

I teach courses on Shakespeare, early modern drama and poetry, book history, and the theory and practice of working with material texts. I have a joint appointment with the UI Center for the Book.

My current book project examines the representation of women’s political activism in South African visual culture. I am committed to creating a hospitable and welcoming space in my classes and to provide students with the resources they need to meaningfully participate.

I teach courses in Critical Race Theory, Arthurian Romance, premodern images of Jews and Muslims, The Book of Margery Kempe, the Pearl-poet, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and other topics pertaining to the middle ages and theories of identity formation.

Paige Lewis is author of the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019) and co-editor of Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Recovery (Sarabande Books, 2023).

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain.

Dr. Sarah Minor received BUILD Certification through the office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. At Iowa, she teaches graduate courses like “History of the Essay,” “The Krause Essay Prize Seminar,” and “Essay Writing Workshop,” and undergraduate courses like “Honors Seminar in Creative Nonfiction,” “Nonfiction Writing Workshop,” and the special topics course “Writing Across Gender: The Literary Shed.”

My scholarship focuses on the British long 18th century and ranges from the 4th-century Sayings of the Desert Fathers to contemporary Gothic fiction. Across my work, I am interested in thinking critically about secularism as an ideology and finding fresh language to speak about religion in its breadth and complexity as we encounter it in literature, the world, and personal experience.