Drop-In Hours

Monday and Thursday 2:00-2:45 pm and Tuesday 3:30-4:45 pm

About

Naomi Greyser is associate professor of English and American Studies as well as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. In her research, teaching, and service, Greyser engages the process of knowledge creation, with an eye towards making space for messiness and unpredictability—but not too much!

Greyser’s first book, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, was published with Oxford University press in 2017. Her articles appear in journals across the humanities, including American Quarterly, Feminist Theory, American Literature, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures in the US. 

With the support of grants from the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute and Iowa’s provost office, Greyser is completing Unblocked: Writing, Research, and the Creative Process (under contract with the University of Chicago Press).

A passionate teacher and winner of the President and Provost Award for Teaching as well as the Collegiate Teaching Award, Greyser strives to build lively learning communities where students can engage in writing, reflecting, and creating in a world that too often cuts off these vital human activities. Classes scaffold workshops, conferences, and support for original research-based projects into the term. All students are warmly invited to visit her office to talk about class material and their aims at the university and beyond.

Greyser earned her PhD in English & Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine with certificates in critical theory and interdisciplinary gender studies. She held a postdoctoral fellowship in writing and rhetoric at Stanford University before joining the faculty at Iowa and learning to love the prairie.

Research areas

• Writing, inquiry and university studies
• 19th-Century US literatures and cultures
• Intersectional cultural aesthetics
• Cultural geography and the geo-humanities
• The interdisciplinary study of emotion and cognition