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.

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 is a first year Ph.D. student in American Studies at the University of Iowa focusing on tactile representations of animals, particularly with regard to 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. Hallie currently serves as an instructor for the American Studies course Understanding American Cultures.

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.

Kate Avery is a first year Masters Student in American Studies. Born and raised in Virginia, she attended the College of William & Mary for her undergraduate studies, where she double-majored in Literature and American Studies. Her research interests include American film and literature, with special attention to questions of adaptation, reception, race/ethnicity, and gender.

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 second 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 first-year Ph.D. student in American Studies. She received her B.A. in History and Political Science at Gustavus Adolphus College and her M.A. in Public History at The University of Northern Iowa. Prior to her time at Iowa, she worked at the UNI Museum for two years managing the Rural School Oral History Project, developing the Rural School Digital Story Map, and assisting with the management and curation of the Rural School Collection.

Dominic is a Ph.D. student in American Studies and Gender, Women & Sexuality studies. His research interests center American zoos; how space and place frame constructions of interspecies relationships, bodily integrity and the reproductive politics of conservation breeding programs.

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 popular culture, art, language and daily life – with a focus on people’s experiences of intimacy and belonging in North America.

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.

Peter is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of American Studies, and is a practicing attorney in Iowa. Recent projects have focused on race, culture, and the law, including topics such as the Green Book, 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.

Janeanne Levenstein is a Master’s student in the Sports Studies subtrack of American Studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also working toward 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 race and sports, resistance and the body, American popular culture and the lawyer in American Culture. She is particularly interested in the role of the body in resistance through sport. Born and raised in California,

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.

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.

Catriona (Tina) Parratt, Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Sport 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.

Ailey Picasso is a M.A. student in American Studies. She received her B.A. in Molecular Biology and Dance from Hampshire College and her M.F.A. in Dance and Choreography from the University of Iowa. Her research is centered on uncovering how capital shapes and complicates the workings of American dance and culture.

Horace Porter is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of English & American Studies. He currently serves as chair of Iowa’s Department of American Studies as well as the chair of the African American Studies Program.  

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 an associate professor of American Studies and English, as well as Director of Graduate Studies. Her research interests include American literature and culture, 1750-1900.

Diann has 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.

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.

Mathew Swiatlowski conducts research at the intersection of media, technology, and cultural studies. With a deep interest in historiography, he is animated by questions of process and power in the production of historical knowledge. His research and teaching interrogates gaps and silences in the historical record, with an emphasis on the command of race, class, gender, and ability to structure experience and limit possibility across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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 an Associate Professor of American Studies and Director of 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.

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.