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.

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.

Austin Araujo is a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and he earned his MFA in Poetry from Indiana University.

Elise Bickford received an SB in Philosophy from MIT, an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. She translates poems and essays from German. Her work can be found in Chess Life Magazine, the Columbia Review, Guesthouse, and Peripheries.

I offer a range of courses centered on British and transimperial literature 1830-1940, with an emphasis on poetry, nonfiction, and the social, political, and cultural contexts of literature. I serve as editor of the William Morris Archive, and my recent books and editions consider the poetry and socialism of William Morris as well as the writings of Victorian and modernist working-class women.

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. 

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.

Annie Burkhart (she/her) is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa and a General Education Literature (GEL) instructor. Annie studies gender and sexuality in Victorian and fin de siècle culture, aiming to uncover queer influences in the literature of the period.

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.

Fiction writer and MacDowell Fellow Corey Campbell has worked for The Nonfiction Writing Program since 2017. She became the Managing Editor of Philological Quarterly in 2020. Corey's fiction has appeared in journals including Story, The Gettysburg Review, Colorado Review, Salamander, Nashville Review, and the anthology Buffalo Cactus and Other New Stories from the Southwest. She has received support from the Iowa Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Community of Writers, University of Houston, Inprint, MacDowell, and the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Maria Capecchi  (she/her) is an English Ph.D. candidate and General Education Literature (GEL) instructor at the University of Iowa, where she studies early modern poetry and drama, with additional concentrations in performance, book studies, and critical race theory. Maria’s research includes cross-disciplinary work with the UI Department of Theatre Arts and with the UI Center for the Book, where she has earned a graduate certificate.