2020 Faculty Institute on Engagement & the Academy
Darryl Heller is a visiting assistant professor who not only describes himself as an activist academic, but has walked extensively in both worlds. While earning his BA in Philosophy at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC, he spent two summers working with migrant farmworkers along the Carolina Sea Islands. Although he was familiar with poverty, this experience was a visceral introduction to the face of oppression.
Jennifer oversees the Center's communications and plays a major role in facilitating the programs, community engagement, and event planning. An accomplished writer, she is the author of three books, Dan Eldon: Safari as a Way of Life (Chronicle Books, 2011) being the most recent. She has curated several exhibits and co-directed two short documentaries. Jennifer is a lifelong student of yoga and teaches locally. Contact her at jennifer-new@uiowa.edu.
A Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and English and Affiliate Faculty with the Public Policy Center, 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...
Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez is an associate professor specializing in Early Modern Spanish Literature. She has published articles on Christian-Muslim relations in the Mediterranean during the 16th and 17th centuries, and a book exploring Spanish textual manifestations of the phenomenon of captivity during this period (Letras liberadas: Cautiverio, escritura y subjetividad en el Mediterráneo de la época imperial española. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2013).
Anita Jung is an art professor of reproducible media. She is interested in the creative waste materials generated through CNC machines. Her artwork has been curated into numerous exhibitions. She attended Arizona State University, where she received a BFA in painting and drawing; she received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the graphic arts. She maintains a robust studio practice and engages in community projects, fully utilizing being an artist in academia to engage the world around her.
As the 2019–2021 Postdoctoral Fellow for the Andrew W. Mellon–Funded Humanities for the Public Good initiative, McNeil serves as HPG's lead project manager, collaborating closely with faculty, staff, and graduate student members of the HPG Advisory Committee and with the Obermann Center to design institutes and workshops, conduct research and interviews with stakeholders, and assess and document program activities. She also provides project management support for the HPG program and participates in meetings with other Obermann Fellows-in-Residence to share work-in-progress.
Christopher-Rasheem McMillan is a performance related artist and scholar. He has a joint appointment between Dance and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. McMillan received his BA from Hampshire College (2007), his MFA in Experimental Choreography from the Laban Conservatoire, London (2011), and his Ph.D. in Theology and Religious Studies from King’s College, London (2017).
Consuelo Guayara Sánchez is a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric. She is a human geographer with particular interests in political economy, development, cultural geography, and nature and society theories. She has a regional specialty in Latin America. As part of a larger focus on discursive and material practices embedded in environment and development issues and concerns, and production of knowledge, Consuelo infuses geography and rhetoric courses with community-engaged questions of social and environmental sustainability.
I teach policy studies at Grinnell College. I entered academia rather late in life after spending many years working, first, as a community and labor organizer and, later, as an analyst and strategist for several national nonprofit organizations. I have always mixed my research interests with engagement on social problems. My current research is on food security and voting rights in the US. My other interests include incorporating public problem solving in undergraduate curricula.
Eric Gidal teaches courses in literature and environmental history, with a historical focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His last book Ossianic Uncomformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (Virginia UP, 2015), explores a modern quest to locate vestiges of ancient poetry in the landscapes of an industrial world. More recently, he has been exploring distant reading methods in concert with historical GIS (geographic information science) as a means of engaging with the textual archives of the industrial...
Heather Parrish is assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Iowa School of Art & Art History. She is a multi-media artist who uses printmaking, experimental photography, and installation work to explore complexities of embodiment. With a focus on the boundary, she investigates the porous, mutually creative relationship between inhabitant and environment. She is recently engaged in an ongoing collaboration with Brooklyn-based scientist Dr. Elizabeth Henáff. The project explores microorganisms living in the Gowanus Canal.
Kimberly Musial Datchuk has a PhD in art history with a specialty in 19th-c. European art. As the Curator of Learning and Engagement at the University of Iowa Stanely Museum of Art, she connects the museum to campus life. Her research and curatorial interests include institutional critique; and the intersection of art, gender, sexuality, and technology, particiularly in fin-de-siecle France. She has presented her research in France, England, and Poland.
Kirsten received her M.A. and Ph.D. in German literature at the University of Iowa after having completed undergraduate studies at Luther College including a year at the Westfälische-Wilhelms Universität in Münster. Her Master’s thesis explored thematically and linguistically the writings of Anant Kumar, an immigrant Indian author composing in German.
Lisa Ortiz is a 2020-21 Provost Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow continuing at the University of Iowa after her appointment as the 2019-20 Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” Mellon Sawyer Seminar in the Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Iowa.
Lori Adams teaches in the Department of Biology and directs the Latham Science Engagement Initiative. The goal of the Latham Fellows program is to empower undergraduate science majors to take science out of the lab and into the community to celebrate science and the intersection of arts, science and humanities. Students use their creative strengths to make science more accessible to communities that they are connected with and passionate about.
Naomi Greyser is associate professor of Rhetoric, English, and Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also executive director of Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI).
Nathan Platte’s research and teaching interests include American film music, opera, collaborative creativity, and musical adaptations across media. Platte’s recent publications explore film music of Hollywood’s studio era from a variety of angles, including the collaborative process of film scoring, the intersection of technology and music, the role of studio orchestras, and soundtrack albums.
Sujatha Sosale studies the capacity-building and empowering roles of media and communication in international development. She is interested in the use of contemporary media as well as traditional mass media in contexts involving social change, and media representations of public affairs in developing countries. Her geographical areas of interest include South Asia and the Southern Indian Ocean Rim. She teaches a variety of courses on communication and change, political economy, research methods, and social media.
Vero Rose Smith is an artist, curator, and educator based in Iowa City. Her work centers on climate change and the economic and historical circumstances that built inequality into everyday environments. In the studio, Smith designs participatory performanes derived from large scale data sets. Smith's curated exhibitions similarly rely on thoughtful community collaborations to explore hidden inequities in artisitc production. In the classroom, Smmith employs active learning strategies to engage students in the making of art, culture, and community.