My work focuses on the connections among medieval/Renaissance poetry, economics, and the environment. My current book project, Work, Waste, and Reform: The Political Ecology of the Piers Plowman Tradition, 1350-1600, explores the ways in which medieval poetry about agrarian work informed early colonial ideologies in the sixteenth-century.

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism.

Bennett Sims is the author of the novel A Questionable Shape, which received the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for The Believer Book Award, and the collection White Dialogues.

Harry Stecopoulos, Professor of English, teaches courses on modern US literature, culture, and performance, with specific interests in in the novel, cultural studies, and postcolonial theory.

I write and teach across disciplinary boundaries, with interests in Victorian and modernist fiction, poetics, narrative theory, film and media, and art history.

For over twenty years in Iowa, Bonnie Sunstein has taught nonfiction writing, ethnographic research, methods of teaching of writing, and folklore studies, and directs programs in both undergraduate writing and English education.

Inara Verzemnieks is the author of the memoir, “Among the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe,” published by W.W. Norton. The book, which the Washington Post in a recent review called “important,” and “exquisitely written,” retraces the steps of her grandmother, a war refugee, and her great-aunt, a Siberian exile, in the wake of World War II, and recounts Verzemnieks's own journey back to the remote Latvian village where her family broke apart. 

I joined the English Department at the University of Iowa in 2011. My research and teaching explores twentieth-century poetry and culture, contemporary print and digital media, and the history of literary movements.

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.

The literature, language, and thought of early medieval England lie at the heart of my professional activity. I teach courses that engage students in the challenges and pleasure of literature of the distant past, while my research explores the complexities and delights of cultures of early England.

Doris Witt grew up in Glasgow, Kentucky, and holds a BA in English from Centre College, an MA and PhD in English from the University of Virginia, and a JD from the University of Iowa.  She specializes in post-WWII multiethnic American and transnational/postcolonial literature and culture.

David Wittenberg teaches in English, Comparative Literature, and Cinematic Arts. His research and teaching interests include 19th- through 21st-century literary theory and philosophy, American literature, architectural design and theory, and popular culture studies.