(she/her)
A Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and English and Affiliate Faculty with the Public Policy Center, Teresa Mangum was appointed as Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in 2010. She 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 of special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies. With Anne Valk of Brown University, she co-edits the book series Humanities and Public Life for the University of Iowa Press.

Click Teresa's name to view her full bio and CV.

Andrew Parayil Boge is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication studies with a concentration in Rhetoric, Culture, Engagement and the Graduate Research Assistant for Humanities for the Public Good. He studies rhetorics of race/racism and specializes in South Asian American racialization. His dissertation examines how brownness emerges in the early twentieth century as a rhetorical rubric for race-making to discipline South Asian Indians as subordinate racial subjects within the prevailing white supremacist racial order in the United States. Tracing the emergence of anti-brownness as a distinct mode of racialization highlights brownness as a discursive tool of power, not just a vexed identity marker. The project aims to uncover the discursive processes that underwrite the stabilization of racial hierarchies.

Esther Claudio received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book project, Walking the page, reframing history: Urban comics and the right to the city, analyzes how global sociopolitical dynamics manifest itself in the local use of urban space and how individuals and communities resist, challenge and redesign segregation, gentrification, and the criminalization of racial categorizations in their experience of the city. She organized the First International Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels in Spain (Universidad de Alcalá, 2011), she co-created the www.comicsgrid.com and she is proud to be part of the editorial board of Studies in Comics and CuCo: Cuadernos de Cómics.

As the Assistant Director, Lauren Burrell Cox works with Teresa Mangum to design, plan, promote and conduct programs and to oversee communications for the Center in order to enrich the intellectual community on campus. She received her PhD in English with a concentration in film and media studies from the University of Florida. She is an avid podcaster and has co-created the podcast series Under Review: Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education and The Hipp Six.

In her role as Director of Operations, Erin Hackathorn handles the financial aspects of the center, Teresa Mangum's calendar, and operational issues at the center. She served as the Administrative Services Coordinator for the English Department for seven years. She is an active reader and vegetarian cook. A graduate of the University of Iowa, she lives in Oxford and enjoys spoiling her nephew.

Jenna Hammerich assists with Obermann's web presence and communications. Previously she served as Deputy Managing Editor of The Iowa Review and as a writer for the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. She has an MFA in nonfiction writing and an MA in English literature. She lives on a blueberry farm near Iowa City with her husband, daughter, and llamas.

Schedule:
Monday: 8:30-9:30, 12:30-2:00
Tuesday: 8:30-2:00
Wednesday: 8:30-12:00
Thursday: 8:30-2:00
Friday: 8:30-9:30, 12:30-2:00