Amanda Haertling Thein is Associate Provost for Graduate and Professional Education and Dean of the Graduate College, as well as a professor of Language, Literacy, and Culture in the College of Education. Her research focuses on socio-cultural and socio-emotional aspects of literary response; critical approaches to multicultural literature instruction; and the intersection of critical youth studies and young adult literature.
Ann Ricketts is Associate Vice President in the Office of the Vice President for Research. After a career in sponsored research and assisting faculty in the pursuit of grants, she now oversees human resources and other key administrative and organizational areas of responsibility for the OVPR. Ricketts is the liaison between the OVPR and the Obermann Center and has been an invaluable partner and Ex-Officio member of the Obermann Advisory Board for over a decade.
Brandi Janssen is a clinical assistant professor in Occupational and Environmental Health and the director of Iowa’s Center for Agricultural Safety and Health (I-CASH). Trained as an anthropologist, her research examines the production and marketing strategies of local food producers and their relationships with conventional agricultural production. She has collaborated with area school districts, nonprofits, and community agencies to promote and enhance sustainable food systems locally.
Christopher Harris, Associate Professor, Head of Film & Video Production, is a filmmaker whose films and video installations read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions.
Glenn Penny teaches modern European history at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (UNC Press, 2002) and Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (UNC Press 2013). He has also edited volumes on anthropology and empire and performing indigeneity.
Dr. Choi is C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies. Her research interests are in the areas of gender, religion and transnational history.
Jennifer Buckley is an associate professor in English. She teaches, researches, and writes about modern and contemporary drama, theater, performance art, and media in Europe, the UK, and the US. Her first book manuscript, Beyond Text: Theater and Performance in Print after 1900, details the complex relationship between text and performance in the twentieth-century European and American avant-gardes.
Lauren Lessing is Director of the UI Stanley Museum of Art. She oversees the management and care of the Stanley Museum’s collections as well as its curatorial, educational, and administrative activities. Lessing is an art historian and educator with more than 25 years of experience working in museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
Maurine Neiman is an associate professor in the Biology Department. She received her PhD from Indiana University in 2004. Her research focuses on sexual reproduction. For a full bio, please visit https://clas.uiowa.edu/gwss/people/maurine-neiman.