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. 

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.

Phillip Round’s research and teaching in American literature focuses on material practices and discursive crossings. Each of his three books approaches literary practice from within very different contexts.

Jennie Sekanics is an English Ph.D. scholar and TA for Foundations of English at the University of Iowa, where she studies twentieth and twenty first century fiction, feminist theory, and trauma studies.

Kathleen Shaughnessy is an English Ph.D. candidate who works on themes of the gothic and medical science in 19th-century British literature.

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.

My teaching and scholarship explore literature and culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain, with a particular focus on Scotland.

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.

Darius Stewart is a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Fellow and PhD student in English Literary Studies with a Graduate Certificate in African American Studies, specializing in African American Literature and Culture from 1831 to the present, while also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.

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.

Aileen Tierney is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She studies avant-garde/experimental literature of the 20th-21st century with an emphasis on the emergent methodologies of the digital humanities.