Teresa Mangum is professor emeritus in the Department of English and former Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She served as director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies for fourteen years. Her research and teaching focus on the ways literature and art, especially in nineteenth-century Britain, shaped readers’ understanding of women, of late life, and of connections between humans and other animals. She also writes about best practices in publicly engaged and collaborative scholarship.

Teresa is the author of Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998); editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (Berg 2013); and guest editor for special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorians Periodical Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies. With public historian Anne Valk, Teresa co-edits the book series Humanities and Public Life for the University of Iowa Press. 

The Mellon Foundation funded two multi-year grants during Teresa’s leadership of the Obermann Center. She co-directed the first, Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry, with Jon Winet, Jim Elmborg, and Erik Simpson (Grinnell College). Their work supported the creation of a digital humanities faculty cluster and the founding of a DH lab in the Main Library. In the second, Humanities for the Public Good, she led a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students in designing new ways for graduate programs in the humanities to prepare students for careers in diverse cultural spaces. 

During her years at the University, Teresa received the British Women Writers Association Biennial Award for Contributions to the Study of British Women Writers, the UI President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence, the UI Brody Award, the May Brodbeck Award for Women and Excellence, and the Humane Society Animal and Society Course Award for Innovation. She was elected to the Academy of Community Engagement Scholarship, and in 2026, she followed UI English Professors John Gerber and Richard “Jix” Lloyd-Jones in receiving the Associated Departments of English Francis Andrew March Award from the Modern Language Association, which honors distinguished service to the profession of English.

You can contact Teresa via her University of Iowa email (teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu) or her personal email (teresalmangum@gmail.com).