(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.

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.

Naomi Greyser is associate professor of American studies, English, and gender, women’s & sexuality studies at the University of Iowa. As the P3 Obermann residency fellow, Greyser is joining the center’s team in reflecting on the institutional conditions that best support vibrant art and scholarship, and the increasingly crucial work of university research centers heading into the middle of the 21st Century. Greyser publishes on the human and cultural dimensions of inquiry, with a focus on what it feels like to write and conduct research, how ideas travel, and creativity. She is the author of On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America (Oxford UP 2017) as well as articles in American Literature, American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, and MELUS: Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States, among other journals. Greyser is currently completing her second book, Un/Blocked: Writing, Research and the Creative Process, which offers rhetorical tools, intellectual ingredients, and embodied practices for researchers to work and play with. Drawing on over a decade of working closely with academic writers across disciplines, this volume’s evidence-based approach both complements and augments scholars’ expertise in their own fields. 

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. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing, an MA in English literature, and a postgraduate diploma in architecture. Previously she served as Deputy Managing Editor of The Iowa Review and as a writer for the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Jenna also manages a blueberry farm near Iowa City with her husband, daughter, and llamas.