Tom Oates holds degrees in American Studies and Mass Communication and holds a joint appointment with the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. His interdisciplinary scholarship has appeared in journals spanning communication, sport studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of Football and Manliness and the co-editor of The NFL: Critical and Cultural Perspectives, and Playing to Win: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play.

Laura Kastens provides administrative support to both the American studies and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality studies departments. She has been employed at the University of Iowa since 1999, and with these departments since 2000.

Hallie Abelman (she/they) is a third year Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of Iowa. Their research revolves around tactile representations of animals and the ways that we perform and move in their presence. Hallie comes to Iowa with a deep commitment to ecological theatre and the ways it can be used to de-legitimize renderings of animals that perpetuate racist or ableist practices and ideologies. They hold bachelor's degrees in Anthropology and Community Health from Tufts University (2014), an MFA in “illness arts” from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (NL), and a Performance Studies MA from NYU Tisch. Before moving to Iowa, Hallie worked as the studio manager for the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and the graduate research assistant to the ecological-theatre scholar Una Chaudhuri. Hallie was proud to become a founding member of the North American Association for Critical Animal Studies in 2019.

Bluford Adams is an associate professor in the Departments of American Studies and English. He has taught at Iowa since 1995. His teaching and research focuses on racial, ethnic, and regional identities, immigration history, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. He teaches courses in American Studies on passing and immigration in U.S. culture.

Uche Anomnachi is a fourth year PhD student in American studies and teaching assistant in Rhetoric. His current work centers on race making in American visual culture, Black spectatorship, and post-modern Blackness. He is also a fellow with Iowa City's Center for Afrofuturist Studies.

Susan Birrell is a Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. She has a B.A. in English from St. Lawrence University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, which was the first graduate program in sport studies in the U.S. She joined the American Studies faculty after many years in the UI Department of Health and Sport Studies.

Laurel is a sixth year Ph.D. student in American Studies. She received her B.A. in English from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota and her M.A. in English Literature from the University of Colorado - Boulder. Her research interests include popular American cinema, popular culture, and gender and women’s studies.

Laura is a PhD student in American Studies. She received her B.A. in history and political science at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota and her M.A. in History: Public History at the University of Northern Iowa. Her research dapples in the fields of public history, digital humanities, labor history, Indigenous studies, and memory studies with specific interests in studying the relationship between history and memory, hoboing culture, Indigenous placemaking, digital archiving, and oral history. Currently, she is developing a digital archive called Hobo Archive in partnership with the hoboing community of the upper Midwest.

Dominic is a Ph.D. student in American Studies and Gender, Women & Sexuality studies. Dongilli examines the power of zoos as American institutions—how exhibits use encounters with animals to define environmental belonging in the US; and establish an interspecies civic responsibility through OneHealth narratives and the reproductive politics of conservation breeding programs. Beyond his formal dissertation research, he has pursued this interest in community knowledge formation as a Research Assistant for a Harm Reduction digital storytelling project and Community Archives Coordinator at Public Space One. His work is deeply informed by his prior career as a Great Apes Zookeeper & Conservation Educator, and undergraduate degree in biological sciences.

Naomi Greyser is associate professor of American Studies, English and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa, as well as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. Greyser examines the emotional dimensions of human expression in language, popular culture, art and daily life – with a focus on intimacy and belonging in North America. She also likes to think about what it feels like to write and conduct research, how ideas travel, and creativity.

Steven Horowitz earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. His dissertation topic was the poetry of Paul Goodman. He has an MA in American Studies from Penn State University and a BA in Plant Science from University of Delaware.

Glenn is a second year Ph.D. student in American Studies. Glenn received his B.A. in American Studies and Film Studies at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and his M.A. in American Studies from the University of Wyoming. His current research focuses on the shifting position of cricket within the U.S. sports space and how elite sports institutions and teams are adapting to, or seeking to mitigate, the climate crisis

Peter is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies, and is a practicing attorney. Recent projects have focused on race, culture, and the law, including topics such as the Green Book, the CROWN Act, environmental racism, hate speech, and partisan gerrymandering. Prior work experience has included serving as law clerk to Justice Brent Appel of the Iowa Supreme Court, and as a policy researcher at the Harkin Institute. Peter is passionate about practical application of his research, and has worked in the past on discriminatory pre-textual traffic stops and “ban the box” legislation. At the University of Iowa, Peter serves as both an instructor and teaching assistant in American Studies for courses such as Understanding American Cultures and Sport and the Media.

Janeanne Levenstein is a doctoral student in the Sports Studies subtrack of American Studies at the University of Iowa. She also holds a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies.

Ashley Loup is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of American Studies. Her research interests include sports and memory, public art and commemoration, California cultures and American popular culture. She is particularly interested in sport statuary and memory culture in Los Angeles.

Born and raised in California, Ashley completed her B.A. and M.A. degrees in American Studies at California State University, Fullerton before coming to Iowa City in 2018. Her other interests include fashion in American culture and Art History.

Kim Marra is a theatre historian who specializes in U.S. theatre and performance mainly in New York City at the turn into the twentieth century. From 2008 to 2011, she served as chair of the Department of American Studies. Her book Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in American Theatre, 1865-1914 (U of Iowa Press) won the 2008 Joe A. Callaway Prize awarded biennially for the best book on theatre and drama by the NYU Department of English.

Catriona (Tina) Parratt, Associate Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of Iowa, is a third generation migrant from the Isle of Skye and first generation migrant to Iowa City. Her research and teaching interests are in the history of sport and leisure.

Russell Peterson earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, having returned to school after a career in graphics and a brief and unprofitable foray into stand-up comedy. Upon completing his doctorate, he taught Understanding American Cultures for several semesters as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He also developed the American Political Humor course which he continues to teach as a Guided Independent Study (GIS) course.

Horace Porter is emeritus F. Wendell Miller Professor of English & American Studies.

Lauren Rabinovitz, Professor Emeritus, American Studies and Cinema, received her Ph.D. in American Civilization from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include American cinema, amusement parks and world's fairs, as well as foodways.

John Raeburn is Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at the University of Iowa. His research interests include: American twentieth-century cultural history; American photography; American film; the 1930s; American literature after 1865; and history of the book.

Laura Rigal is associate professor emeritus of American Studies and English. Her research interests include American literature and culture, 1750-1900.

Diann is a doctoral student with a B.A. in Political Science from CSU Channel Islands and an M.A. in American Studies from CSU Fullerton. The fusion between Political Science and Cultural Studies has allowed her to focus on systems and structures of domination, which she incorporates into her work on public memory and narratives of power within the natural and built environments, specifically, at sites of trauma where official memories are reappropriated, recoded, and reimagined.

Research Interests:

The American West and Great Basin
Nuclear Colonialism
Militarized Landscapes
Indigenous Ontologies and Epistemologies
New Media Aesthetics and the Materiality of New Media

Kacie Rubalcava is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies and holds a graduate certificate in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, public memory, literature, visual culture, science and technology, time-space compression, and the digital humanities. Kacie’s dissertation focuses on women’s labor and the appropriation of women’s images in the Southern California citrus industry.

John is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in American Studies and works in the department as a Teaching Assistant. His current research considers the ways U.S. culture indices, prefigures, and responds to economic, political, and geographic transformations — with a particular focus on labor. In the past, he has worked as a research assistant for the Iowa Labor History Oral Project (ILHOP).

Eric Vázquez is an assistant professor in American Studies and Latino Studies at University of Iowa. His scholarship emphasizes the cultural, political, military, and economic bonds that link populations and institutions in the United States to Central America.

Travis Vogan is Professor of American Studies and Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies. His research and teaching center on sport, media, and U.S. culture. He is especially interested in film and television, media industries, documentary, and how understandings of “high” and “low” culture figure into these topics.

As both a teacher and a scholar, Stephen Warren emphasizes that the past is never safely historical. In the classes he teaches, he asks his students to view academic research with a fresh perspective; as avenues for serving the world rather than knowledge that is peculiar and limited to the college classroom.

Nick Yablon received his B.A. in history from the University of Birmingham (England) and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago.  His area of expertise is nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century U.S. cultural history, with a research focus on urban history, memory and monument studies, the built environment, material culture, photography, and the changing experiences of space and time in modernity.