Faculty

Loyce Arthur

 

Loyce Arthur (CV) is Associate Professor and Head of Design in the Theatre Arts Department. She has designed costumes for numerous productions including the US premiere of Peter Pan & Wendy at the Prince Music Theater, Philadelphia; Langston Hughes’ Black Nativity, which won a special OBIE award; Box Office of the Damned at the Classic Stage Company Theatre, New York and The Brothers Sun and Moon at the Kennedy Center for the performing Arts, Washington, D.C. Her work at The University of Iowa includes Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Seascape, Wonderchild, The Magic Flute, The Learned Ladies and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

In Fall 2005 she designed costumes for Nocturnal Wandering and Brokenville with distinguished theater artist Anton Juan in Athens, Greece. In fall 2004 she designed costumes and masks for Shadows of the Reef, a piece about the plight of Phillipine women and children created by artist Anton Juan. Research Awards include an Old Gold Award to study mask making with Donato Satori in Italy; a West African Research Association fellowship to study ritual and performance in Ghana; and research grants to extend her knowledge of Balinese mask traditions. East Indian Kutiyattam and Kathakali theatre forms and West African Research traditional arts and performance; a Faculty Development Award and travel grants to be an artist-in-residence at the Mahogany Mas Camp in London UK, working with award winning carnival designer Clary Salandy on Notting Hill Carnival. She was co-director of the 2001 National Theatre Mask Conference, the first of its kind ever held in the United States, Summer 2004. She presented her work on Trinidad carnival at a symposium in Santiago de Cuba. Professor Arthur is currently developing a performance piece based on Caribbean Carnival arts and the spread of the traditions around the world.

Dr. Arthur's website
Email: loyce-arthur@uiowa.edu
Theatre Arts, Associate Professor
142 Theatre Building
(319) 353-2409

Maria Jose Barbosa

Dr. Barbosa's research interests lie within the Brazilian novelistic tradition with the focus on Clarice Lispector. She published articles, annotated bibliographies, encyclopedia entries, and books about Clarice's life and work. The following books are in print: Clarice Lispector: Spinning the Webs of Passion (1996), Clarice Lispector: Mutações Faiscantes / Sparkling Mulations (a bilingual edition, 1997), and Clarice Lispector: Des/fiando as Teias da Paixão (2001), a translation into Portuguese of Spinning the Webs of Passion. Although the study of Lispector’s texts has been of main emphasis for her teaching and research agenda, she has also written about other authors and areas of study. She was also a contributing editor to a book-project, Passo e Compasso: Nos Ritmos do Envelhecer [In the Rhythms of Growing Older], in November 2002, about representations of aging in Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil, Portugal, Angola, and Mozambique). The nineteen essays explore ideologies, behaviors, social expectations, and endowments, focusing on questions of identity, ethnicity, language, sexuality, the role of elders within their families and also within specific communities (African, Afro-Brazilian, Jewish, and Indigenous groups in Brazil). Parallel to her interest in literature written by women lies her ongoing interest in Afro-Brazilian culture and literature.

She has published articles, chapters of books, interviews, and encyclopedia entries, and made conference presentations on the the following topics: Afro-Brazilian poets Adão Ventura and Edimilson Pereira, Exu (an African deity), Pomba-Gira (the Brazilian counterpart, in Umbanda’s cosmology), mulattas, Capoeira (Afro-Brazilian martial art/dance), and Chica da Silva (a 19th-century former slave woman in Brazil). Currently she is working on her book project on women’s studies and Afro-Brazilian culture and literature. It will analyze the role of Afro-Brazilian women in the development of Brazilian cultural identities

Paul Cunliffe

Paul Cunliffe is the staff percussionist with the University of Iowa Department of Dance. Working for the department since 1979, he provides accompaniment for modern dance, visiting artist workshops and master classes, and teaches rhythm and drumming classes. Paul has composed original music for many student and faculty choreographers with performances at Hancher Auditorium and Space/Place Theatre in Iowa City and the Cunningham Studios in New York. Paul co-leads the UI Afro-Cuban Drum & Dance Ensemble which was formed after organizing a study abroad trip in 2003 to take University of Iowa music and dance students to Matanzas, Cuba to study Afro-Cuban folkloric dancing, drumming, and song from members of the world renown Los Munequitos de Matanzas and Grupo AfroCuba. The new ensemble has been well received by Iowa audiences and in 2004 had the honor of performing at the Percussive Arts Society International Conference in Nashville.

Outside the University Paul has maintained a busy schedule through the years as a freelance musician working as a drummer and percussionist doing anything from weddings, bar mitzvahs, bars and dance halls to studio recording, advertising jingles and musical theater shows. He served as house band drummer for many shows during the mid 80’s with Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, with weekly broadcasts on National Public Radio from their home base in St. Paul, MN, the Auditorium Theatre in downtown Chicago, and while on tour with the show in Alaska and Hawaii. For over 12 years, Paul has performed and recorded with the Iowa based Latin jazz and salsa group Orquesta Alto Maiz which had the opportunity to perform several concerts at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival while touring Europe. He currently performs with Dennis McMurrin and The Demolition, Calle Sur Fiesta, Orquesta Alto Maiz and the John Shultz Organization.

Anny Curtius

Dr. Curtius's website

James Dreier

James Dreier (CV) is a drum set, Latin percussion and jazz educator, clinician, and performer. He holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music (Boston, MA) and a Master of Arts degree in music theory from the University of Iowa. His interest in Latin music has taken him to Brazil, where he served a residency at the Conservatorio Pernambucano de Musica in Recife, and twice to Cuba, where he studied with the legendary Rumba group Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, and master drummer Jesus Alfonzo. James performs with Orquesta Alto Maiz, Combo Nuevo, OddBar Trio, and the UI Faculty Jazz Ensemble and others.

Teaching

Dr. Dreier is a Lecturer in Jazz Studies at the University of Iowa. There he teaches Jazz Improvisation for Drum Set, Small Jazz Ensembles (Latin/jazz Ensemble), Jazz Techniques and Cultural Connections. He also co-leads the U of Iowa Afro-Cuban Drum Ensemble.

Armando Duarte

Professor and Artistic Director of Duarte Dance Works, a contemporary dance company. Founding member of the internationally known Cisne Negro (Black Swan) Dance Company from São Paulo, Brazil. He has received a Best New Choreographer award from the São Paulo Association of Arts Reviewer and, in 1989, he was one of the international guest choreographers at the American Dance Festival. Since coming to the UI in 1993, he has choreographed 44 original dance pieces and has restaged numerous works from his own repertory in which he continues to perform. He is a two-time winner of the Iowa Old Gold Summer Fellowship; and has received several grants from the Support Program for Arts and Humanities, and the Arts and Humanities Initiative Program at The U of Iowa. He is one of the National Adjudicators for Regional Dance America (RDA). His choreography has been commissioned by several repertory and regional dance companies throughout the world. His international guest appearances included visits to Milan, Geneva, Lausanne, Udine, Paris, São Paulo and Natal. Most recently he has commissioned works for the Victoria Ballet Theater in Texas and the Brigham Young University in Utah.

Mary Lou Emery

Mary Lou Emery (CV) received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches courses in modernist, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures.

Professor Emery has published a book on the Dominican born writer, Jean Rhys, titled Jean Rhys at World's End : Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (U of Texas P(1990). Her critical essays on the Guyanese experimental writer, Wilson Harris, have appeared in Calalloo, The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and a collection edited by Hena Maes Jelinek, The Uncompromising Imagination. She has published on other Caribbean writers, including C.L.R. James, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff as well as the British modernists Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and May Sinclair.

She is currently working on a book length critical study, Modernism and Anglophone Caribbean Literature: The Politics of Vision. This project analyzes a recurring emphasis on acts of vision whether social acts of seeing, representations of inner vision, or literary reflections on visual art in the work of 20th century writers from the Caribbean.

Teaching

Courses she has designed and taught include the following:

• For graduate students: Cross Cultural Modernism; Caribbean Literature: Writings in Exile; and Postcolonial Theory and the Anglophone Caribbean.
• For undergraduates: Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures; Writing by Women of the Anglophone Caribbean; and Caribbean Crosscurrents of the 20th Century.

Professor Emery has received three awards for her teaching, including a Collegiate Teaching Award (2002).

James Giblin

James Giblin (CV) received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His recent publlications which are articles and book chapters include Ecology and Culture in the History of Tanzania (co-editor, 1996) , Family Life, Indigenous Culture And Christianity In Colonial Njombe (1998), Passages in a Struggle Over the Past: Stories of Majimaji in Njombe, Tanzania, Land Tenure, Traditions Of Thought About Land, And Their Environmental Implications In Tanzania (2001), and Divided Patriarchs in a Labor Migration Economy: Contextualizing Debate about Family And Gender in Colonial Njombe” (2000).

Professor Giblin’s recent grants are: NEH Collaborative Projects Grant (2001), Arts and Humanities Initiative, University of Iowa, 1998 and 1999, Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Award (1997), and Faculty Scholar Award, University of Iowa (1996). His current research is a book on the social history of 20th-century Tanzania entitled A History of the Excluded: Making Family and Memory a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania; the Majimaji War of 1905-07 in Tanzania; social, economic and ecological history in 19th and 20th century Tanzania.

Teaching

He has taught several courses on African History including, History of Precolonial Africa; History of Colonial Africa; African and African-American Interactions; Graduate Seminar on Africa and the Caribbean; Graduate Seminar on Interpreting Oral Histories.

Professor Giblin will be teaching Pre-colonial African History (16W:120/129:163).
This course concentrates on Africa south of the Sahara. It surveys the major changes in this region over the 2000 years which preceded the onset of European colonial rule in the late 19th century. Thus it brings the story of African history up to 1880, the point at which European colonialism irrevocably changed the course of African social development. The course focuses on the major dynamics of economic and political change, including the development of states and large systems of trade. A major aspect of this history is the Atlantic slave trade. The course places the slave trade in the wider context of African political, economic and social history, and examines its impact on African societies. The course concludes by discussing the ways in which Africans living under European influence in the early colonial period interpreted their own past.

Meenakshi Gigi Durham

Meenakshi Gigi Durham is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa, and Head of the Iowa Center for Communication Study. She taught previously at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests focus on issues of gender, identity, and the media; she has a particular interest in the South Asian diaspora in the United States. Her book Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks (co-edited with Douglas M. Kellner) was published by Blackwell in 2001. Other recent publications include, Displaced persons: Symbols of South Asian Femininity and the Returned Gaze in U.S. Media Culture (Communication Theory , 2001) and Girls, media, and the negotiation of sexuality: A study of race, class and gender in adolescent girls' peer groups (Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 1999). Her work has appeared in Popular Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Communication Theory, Race, Gender & Class, Women's Studies in Communication, and other journals. Professor Durham is currently at work on a book examining the social construction of adolescent sexuality in the context of contemporary media culture.

Teaching

She has taught classes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels on Asian Americans and the media; gender and the media; media, the body, and representation; critical theories of the media; and media, culture, and identity.

Michel Gobat

Professor Michel Gobat's research interests focus on U.S. intervention and social revolution in the Caribbean basin. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Enduring the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule, 1849,1933. Based on research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, the book explores the paradoxical effects of Americanization in Nicaragua from the heyday of Manifest Destiny (1840s/50s) through the U.S. military occupation of 1910-33. Professor Gobat has presented aspects of this work at conferences in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and the U.S. Most recently, his article Against the Bourgeois Spirit: The Nicaraguan Elite and the Threat of Modernity, 1918-1929, was published in the 2000 special issue of Nicaragua’s Revista de Historia on “Elites, Families and Power Networks in Mesoamerican Societies.” In his teaching, Professor Gobat explores the history of the Caribbean basin in the following courses: Modern Latin America; U.S. Latin American relations; U.S. intervention in the Caribbean basin; and Latin American revolutions.

Paul Greenough

Paul Greenough (CV) is Professor of History (primary) in the College of Arts and Sciences and of Community and Behavioral Medicine (secondary) in the College of Public Health who serves as the Director of the Crossing Borders Project. He teaches the history of India and public health and his principal area of research is the social, health and environmental relations of India with the rest of the world. Since 1998, in association with generous colleagues and with the support of the Crossing Borders Program, he has been expanding his range to the Swahili coast of Africa and parts of the English-speaking Caribbean. Recent publications include The Diasporic Crow and the Fabulization of Instinct: How Natural History Enters General History Around the Indian Ocean, (International Accents October 2001: 1-4) and Naturae Ferae: Wild Animals in South Asia and the Standard Environmental Narrative in Agrarian Studies: Synthetic Work at the Cutting Edge, ed. James C. Scott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). An article linking the Caribbean coast of Yucatan to Northern India entitled Bio-ironies of the Fractured Forest: India's Tiger Reserves is forthcoming in Candace Slater, ed., Rainforests Then and Now, and a second article, Pathogens, Pugmarks and Political 'Emergency': The Indian Discourse on Nature in the 1970s, will appear in Paul Greenough and Anna L. Tsing, eds., Imagination and Distress in Southern Environmental Projects (forthcoming Duke University Press, 2003).

Julie Hochstrasser

Julie Hochstrasser (CV) , Associate Professor of Art History, received her BA with Distinction in Art History from Swarthmore College and her MA and PhD in Art History at the University of California at Berkeley. She works on aspects of meaning in seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting particularly in connection with Dutch daily life. She has published on still life in a variety of venues including the catalogue for the recent exhibition Still Life Paintings from the Netherlands, 1580-1720, and several times in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, once on landscape and more recently on domesticity and material culture. Her talk at Columbia University on the visual culture of the trade in pepper became an article entitled Seen and Unseen in the Visual Culture of Trade: the Conquest of Pepper, in The Low Countries and the New World(s): Travel, Discovery, Early Relations, while another on time originally given at the thirtieth International Congress of the History of Art in London is forthcoming from Brepols International.

During this past year she presented at a workshop on the Dutch Colonial and Global Imaginary at the Historians of Netherlandish Art Conference in Antwerp, Belgium; gave a talk on the uses of foods in Dutch still life at the Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Conference on Representations of Food at the University of Texas in San Antonio; hosted a panel on connections between Africa and Europe at the Crossing Borders Convocation at the University of Iowa where she also gave a talk; delivered a paper at the Midwest Art History Society Conference in Milwaukee on African servants in Dutch portraits and still-life paintings, and another on the exchange of influence between Asian porcelain and Dutch tin-glazed earthenware, at the International Conference of Netherlandic Studies at the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on a book for Yale University Press entitled, Trade Secrets: Unpacking Commodities in Still Life of the Dutch Golden Age.

Priya Kumar

Priya Kumar joined the English department in January, 2001. She received her PhD in English from McGill University, Canada, and has taught previously at the University of Virginia. In Spring 2000, she was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute on Violence, Culture and Survival and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Her specialization is in postcolonial studies with a focus on South Asian literature and culture.

Her areas of research and teaching include: nationalism and minority culture;discourses of cosmopolitanism and secularism; testimony and trauma theory; postcolonial feminist fiction and theory; the literature of displacement and exile. In recent years, she has become increasingly interested in the literatures of the South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, Fiji and East Africa. She has published essays on The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in Interventions(Routledge, 1999), on secularism in Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, on the Urdu writer, Qurratulain Hyder (Routledge, 2001), and on the South African writer, Bessie Head (Africa Quarterly, 1994). She is currently working on a book project on secularism, religious violence and collective memory in the Indian subcontinent.

Adriana Mendez

Born in Havana, Cuba, Adriana Mendez Rodenas (CV) received her PhD from Cornell University. She is a professor in the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Her areas of expertise are nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American narrative, Caribbean literature,and women’s writing.

A specialist in the Hispanic Caribbean, Professor Méndez Rodenas has published widely in nineteenth and twentieth century Cuban literature and culture. Her first book, Severo Sarduy: el neobarroco de la transgresión (UNAM: 1983) won the National Literary Essay Prize in Mexico. Her second book, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba—The Travels of Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Condesa de Merlin, was published in 1998 by Vanderbilt University Press. The Editorial Verbum in Madrid has recently published a collection of essays entitled Cuba en su imagen: Historia e identidad en la literatura cubana (2002). Her articles Cuban anti slavery narrative have appeared in Cuba: The Elusive Nation, Cuban Studies, and New Literary History. She has also written on the Cuban diaspora and on Cuban American literature in Modern Language Notes and Callaloo.

Teaching

At the University of Iowa, she has taught and designed the following courses: Caribbean Literature in Comparative Perspective, Cultural Identity in Caribbean Literature, and Cuban American Literature and Culture. With the support of an Iowa Humanities grant, in 1989 she organized an international conference, “Islands in Time: Identity and Culture in the Caribbean,”co directed with Fredrick Woodard. With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, she is finishing a book on European women’s travels to Latin America and the Caribbean during the period of nation formation.

Barbara Mooney

Barbara Burlison Mooney (CV) published her article on the symbolism of middle-class housing in the black community, The Comfortable, Tasty, Framed Cottage: The Emergence of an African-American Architectural Iconography, appeared in the March 2002 issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians .

Teaching

Professor Mooney teaches African American visual culture and European architectural history.Her research focuses on American architecture including the built environments of African Americans from the colonial period to the present.

Douglas Midgett

Dr. Midgett's website
Email: douglas-midgett@uiowa.edu
Anthropology Department, Associate Professor
215 Macbride Hall
(319) 335-0538

Mark A. Peterson

Dr. Peterson's website
Email: mark-a-peterson@uiowa.edu
Department of History, Associate Professor
175 Schaeffer Hall
(319) 335-2291

Jacki Rand

Dr. Rand's website
Email: jacki-rand@uiowa.edu
History Department, Assistant Professor
280 Schaeffer Hall
(319) 335-2437

Katrina Sanders

Dr. Sander's website
Email: katrina-sanders@uiowa.edu
Education Policy and Leadership, Assistant Professor
N428 Linquist Center
(319) 335-6283

T.M. Scruggs

Professor T. M. Scruggs has taught at the Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua and Florida International University in Miami. He is currently the ethnomusicologist at the University of Iowa, where he founded a Trinidadian style steel pan ensemble. His primary research focus is on the use of music to construct social identity in the Americas. His research and teaching includes consideration of the circulation of expressive culture both from Europe and Africa across the Atlantic as well as the move of American-based musics eastward to Africa. He is the principal contributor for major reference works on Central American music and dance, on which he has published in audio, video and print format. Professor Scruggs’ writings have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Yearbook for Traditional Music, Latin American Music Review, Music and Performance, as well as chapters in Music in Latin American Culture: Regional Traditions (Routledge), Latin American Popular Music (Routledge), and Transformations and National Histories: Narrating the Nation in the Public Sphere (Duke Univ. Press). He is a guest editor of an upcoming issue of World of Music dedicated to his latest research area, the relationship between local music and the institutionalized aesthetics of global religions.

Daniel Stark

Daniel Stark (CV), Visiting Assistant Professor, danced with the Pennsylvania Dance Theatre, Corning Dances and Co., David Berkey Dance Company, Duarte Dance Works and Vandance. He has performed works by Alfonso Cata, David Dorfman, Louis Falco, Françoise Martinet, Lonne Moretton, Charles Moulton, David Parsons and Shapiro & Smith. His choreography has been featured at the Regional American College Dance Festival (ACDF) in ’03, ’04, ’05 and ‘06 and at the Kennedy Center (Diplomacy) in Washington D.C. as part of the National ACDF Conference, and he has set dances on the Beijing Dance Academy, Quad Cities Ballet, the Aha! Dance Theatre, Vandance, Duarte Dance Works, and Kayle + Company. Stark is the dance coordinator for The UI Afro-Cuban Drum and Dance Ensemble, which performed at the prestigious Percussive Arts Society International Conference (PASIC) in 2004, and continues to perform locally and throughout the region. He was the recipient of the Outstanding Performer Award at the Regional ACDF festival in ’04 and was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellow in ’02. Daniel holds a B.S. in Psychology and an M.F.A. in Dance, and currently is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa Department of Dance.

Richard Turner

Email: richard-turner@uiowa.edu
African American World Studies Department, Associate Professor
436 English Philosophy Building
(319) 335-3467

International Programs Sitemap
Privacy Statement
About This Website
Copyright © 2007 The University of Iowa
Page Last Modified: 4/8/2008

 

International Programs
1111 University Capitol Centre
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa 52242 USA
(319) 353.2700