Esther Peeren
Esther Peeren is professor of cultural analysis at the University Amsterdam. From 2018 to 2024, she directed the ERC-funded research project “Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World.” Her publications include The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) and the co-edited volumes Other Globes: Past and Peripheral Imaginations of Globalization (Palgrave, 2019), Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (Palgrave, 2024; Open Access), and Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (Brill, 2025; Open Access).
Rae Garringer
Rae Garringer (they/them) is a writer, oral historian, and audio producer who grew up on a sheep farm in southeastern West Virginia, and now lives a few counties away on traditional S’atsoyaha and Šaawanwaki lands. Rae is the author and editor of Country Queers: A Love Letter (Haymarket Books, 2024) which received a 2025 Stonewall Honor Book Award, and the editor of To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans & Two Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, 2025). When not working with stories, Rae spends a lot of time failing at keeping goats in fences, two-stepping around their trailer, and swimming in the river.
Stephen Warren
Andy Mink
Andrew T. Mink (Andy) has served as the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Rural Initiative since 2023. He provides leadership in shaping and growing the initiative in order to establish the programmatic and operational infrastructure necessary to execute pan-institutional collaborations that expand the reach of the Smithsonian’s resources, expertise, and programming.
He joined the Office of the Undersecretary of Education after successful years as the vice president of education at the National Humanities Center (NHC). Mink began his career in higher education in 2001 as the director of education and outreach with the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia. He later served as the executive director of LEARN NC in the Peabody School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Tyler Hahn
Tyler Hahn is the Director of the Cherokee Public Library in Cherokee, Iowa, where he leads initiatives focused on digital equity, inclusive engagement, and future-ready workforce development. He serves as the Midwest representative for the Association for Rural & Small Libraries board, serves on the UI School of Library and Information Science Advisory Committee, and is a member of the Iowa Governor's STEM Council, where he was recognized for his programming within the organization's "STEM Gem" poster series. A 2024 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, Tyler has expanded rural access to STEM education, built international esports partnerships for youth, and launched adult training programs in emerging technologies. He advocates for rural libraries as essential civic infrastructure—empowering communities through innovation, education, and connection.
Hope Tucker
Hope Tucker is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts. Since 2000, Tucker has worked to transform and expand what we know as a daily form of terse, text-driven, populist narrative through The Obituary Project, a compendium of moving image that gives new life to the antiquated documentary practice of salvage ethnography. She has animated cyanotypes of downwinders and instructions for making fishing nets by hand; photographed shuttered bread factories, fallen witness trees, and decaying civil rights era landmarks; recorded mobile phone footage of the last public phone booths of Finland; written the text of a video out of paper clips, a Norwegian symbol of solidarity and nonviolent resistance; and retraced the path of protest that closed the only nuclear power plant in Austria.
Carlton Turner
Carlton Turner works across the country as a performing artist, arts advocate, policy shaper, lecturer, consultant, and facilitator. Carlton is also founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production. The MCCP uses arts and agriculture to support rural community, cultural, and economic development in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi where he lives with his wife Brandi and three children.
Carlton Turner is also co-founder and co-artistic director, along with his brother Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction). M.U.G.A.B.E.E. is a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling.
Travis Kraus
Travis is Professor of Practice in the School of Planning and Public Affairs and has served as Director of the Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities (IISC) since 2016. He serves on the board of directors for EPIC-N, an international network of community engagement programs, and he also enjoys serving on the board of the local arts non-profit, Public Space One. He was the recipient of the prestigious 2025 Michael J. Brody Award for Faculty Excellence in Service.
Prior to joining the IISC, Travis led the Chamber of Commerce and Economic Development organizations in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, worked as a regional planner for the Southeast Iowa Regional Planning Commission, and was a successful small business entrepreneur for many years.
Ashley Laux
Ashley supports the day-to-day operations of the Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities (IISC) and works with community partners and University of Iowa faculty, staff, and students to facilitate engaged-learning projects that promote economic development, social justice, and sustainability in Iowa. Ashley joined the IISC in 2025. Throughout her career, Ashley has facilitated local and global curricular community engagement partnerships in higher education and community settings.
Cherisse Jones-Branch
Cherisse joined the History Department faculty in 2003. She most recently published Crossing the Line: Women's Interracial Activism in South Carolina during and after World War II (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), and is co-editor of Arkansas Women: Their Lives and Times (Athens: University of Georgia Press, (2018). Her current research project is "Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps": Rural Black Women's Activism in Arkansas, 1913-1965.
Rusty Smith
Rusty Smith is the Associate Director of Rural Studio, Auburn University’s internationally recognized design-build architecture program, and Professor of Architecture. Established in 1993 Rural Studio gives architecture students a hands-on educational experience while assisting the underserved communities of Alabama’s rural Black Belt region. Over the past decade Rural Studio has expanded the scope and complexity of its projects to include the design and construction of community-oriented infrastructure, the development of more broadly-attainable small home affordability solutions, and a comprehensive approach to addressing insecurity issues relative to income, energy, food, health, and education resources.
Stephanie Radke
Stephanie Radke is Clinical Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology—General Obstetrics and Gynecology at the UI Carver College of Medicine. She is a Fellow with the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and won the 2023 UI Physicians Excellence in Quality Award. She developed and implemented the Iowa Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (IMQCC), funded by the Maternal Health Innovation grant from Health Resources and Services Administration. Her research interests include lactation and breastfeeding medicine, quality improvement methodology, and geographic disparities in maternal health.