Sophia Craig is a first-year English Ph.D. student interested in 19/20th century American Literature, the theory of psychoanalysis, and Book studies.

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.”

Rajorshi Das is a PhD candidate in English with a certificate in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS). They study contemporary liberal queer narratives emerging out of India across print and digital platforms.

Camille Davis (she/they) is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Iowa. They are specializing in international poetic communities with a focus on network theory and book history.

Dr. Eric Ensley is Curator of Rare Books and Maps in the Special Collections & Archives, where he works to make rare materials better accessible to students, faculty, and researchers across the University of Iowa campus and beyond.

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.