Faculty
Eric Gidal
Eric Gidal is Associate Professor of English. His research and teaching concern aesthetics, literature, and the visual arts in Britain and the European continent during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His first book, Poetic Exhibitions: Romantic Aesthetics and the Pleasures of the British Museum (Bucknell University Press, 2001) studies the British Museum during its first century (1753-1856) as an institutional embodiment of literary, aesthetic, and ideological debates. His current research focuses more philosophically upon the affective dimension of national ideologies and the public sphere, exploring how the concept of melancholy was transformed in the eighteenth century from a sign of humoral imbalance, intellectual genius, or religious vocation into a category of national identification and a mark of civil society.
Teaching: Professor Gidal teaches regular courses in British Romanticism, Eighteenth-Century Travel Narratives, and literary representations of the visual arts.
David Gompper
David Gompper, Professor of Composition and the Director of the Center for New Music within the School of Music, is an active composer and pianist. His most recent works include a work for violin and piano, a setting for baritone and piano on the Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby, and a setting of Dickinson's Wild Nights for women's chorus and organ. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory on a Fulbright Award (2002-03). A number of articles on Russian musicians will appear in the forthcoming edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Contemporary Russian Culture. This fall Gompper will accompany Viennese violinist Wolfgang David in a recital of contemporary music in Clapp Recital Hall (Nov. 9), Connecticut College (Nov. 13), and Frankfurt (Nov. 17). Their first CD has recently been released by Albany Records.
Dr. Gompper's website
E-mail: david-gompper@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-1626
Timothy Havens
Dr. Havens (Ph.D. Indiana University) is Assistant Professor of television studies in the Department of Communication Studies and a former Senior Fulbright Scholar in Hungary, where he researched the influence of globalization on Hungarian television broadcasting. He is currently finishing work on a book project entitled Global Television Program Sales with British Film Institute, as well as a proposal for a book on Central European entertainment television, tentatively entitled, Windows on the West: Central European Television in Transition.
Lisa Heineman
Lisa Heineman is Associate Professor of History and teaches courses on Germany, Europe, women, and gender. Her past research has examined gender, war, and memory in Germany; welfare states in comparative perspective (Fascist, Communist, and Democratic); and the significance of marital status for women. Out of this research came a book, What Difference Does a Husband Make: Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (University of California Press, 1999) and many articles. With her 2002 article, Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable? (Journal of the History of Sexuality), she began to work more intensively on the history of sexuality. Her current book, Sexual Consumer Culture in an Age of Affluence, traces sexual consumer culture in West Germany from the end of the Second World War to the legalization of pornography in 1975. In addition, she is editing a book on the history of sexual violence in conflict zones from the ancient world to the age of human rights. Lisa is the Academic Coordinator of the Sexuality Studies Program and serves on the Executive Board of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights.
Dr. Heineman's website
E-mail: Elizabeth-heineman@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-2299.
Cheryl Herr
Cheryl Herr is Professor of English, jointly appointed in Cinema and Comparative Literature, teaches British and Irish literature and film. As a Guggenheim Fellow, she lived in Ireland during 1992, the year when the Single European Act came into effect; Herr's Critical Regionalism and Cultural Studies: From Ireland to the American Midwest (1996) reflects widely on the economic and cultural processes involved in the Europeanization of Ireland. She also wrote Joyce's Anatomy of Culture (1986), For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas (1991), and The Field (2002). Cheryl Herr has assessed film projects for the Republic of Ireland's Higher Education Authority, Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Board, and Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She is a founding member of the research network, Cinema and Emerging European Nations in the 20th Century, which includes film scholars from Norway, Finland, Latvia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Her current projects address everyday life in the Atlantic archipelago.
Email: cheryl-herr@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-3219
Christian Jensen
Dr. Jensen (PhD UCLA, 2004) is an assistant professor of Political Science. His research focuses on the political institutions of the European Union and other industrialized democracies with a particular emphasis on policy implementation and the relationships between national and supranational institutions and actors. His work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, European Union Politics and Governance. He is currently researching the administrative institutions that EU member states use to implement environmental policy. He is also currently working on two projects with Jae-Jae Spoon investigating the role that national political parties play in the European Parliament and in implementing EU environmental policy at the national level.
Dr. Jensen's Website
Email: christian-jensen@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-2341
Michel Laronde
Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Director: Undergraduate Studies, Study Abroad, European Studies Group
Chair: CLAS Faculty Assembly
My main research interests, teaching responsibilities and publications are in the domain of the postcolonial literatures and cinema from France, represented mostly by immigration from North- and subSaharan Africa. An area of global transit for postcolonial subjects and cross-cultural encounters, the literatures and cultures of (im)migration and exile include all sorts of practices that modify 21st-century France as well as the diverse cultures of the Francophone world.
Postcolonialiser la Haute Culture à l’Ecole de la République (2008) studies how postcolonial subjects in France reinterpret references to classical literary models used in school to teach language and values. This process of an ongoing evolution of the Culture of the Nation is approached through studies of immigration literature and postcolonial cinema. Autour du roman beur. Immigration et identité (1993) is a seminal book that studies the identity of second- and third generation “North Africans” in France through the presentation of their literary output in the 1980s, called roman beur.
I have also edited two volumes of articles by international scholars. L'Ecriture décentrée. La langue de l’Autre dans le roman contemporain (1996) follows the evolution of the fiction of immigration in France and addresses questions of style and language, narratology and discourse analysis in postcolonial novels. Leïla Sebbar (2003) presents studies on the fiction of this prolific and influential French author born in Algeria.
Teaching: Because migrations are at the crossroads of global and specific historical and linguistic situations, past and future imaginations of France and the French-speaking world are present in all my courses. I regularly teach "Quebecois literature", that focuses on the culture, literature and cinema of Quebec, and courses on Translation and Comparative Stylistics. Graduate students in the department work with me on North African, West African, and immigration literatures, cultures and cinema.
Email: michel-laronde@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-2264
Katina Lillios
Katina Lillios, Associate Professor of Anthropology, specializes in the archaeology of prehistoric Portugal and Spain. Her research and teaching are concerned with the origins and evolution of complex societies in prehistoric Europe, nationalism and archaeology, and the role of memory and material mnemonics in the development of social inequality. She is the author of Heraldry for the Dead: Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Plaques of Neolithic Iberia (University of Texas Press, forthcoming), and the editor (or co-editor) of The Origins of Complex Societies in Late Prehistoric Iberia (International Monographs in Prehistory, 1995), Material Mnemonics: Everyday Memory in Prehistoric Europe (Oxbow, forthcoming), and Comparative Archaeologies: The American Southwest (AD 900-1600) and the Iberian Peninsula (3000-1500 BC) (forthcoming).
Dr. Lillios' Website
Email: katina-lillios@uiowa.edu
127 Macbride Hall
Phone: 319-335-3023
Teresa Mangum
An Associate Professor of English. Her research and teaching focus on British Victorian literature and culture. Her first book, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (University of Michigan Press, 1998), considers the ways feminists argued their politics through plots during the 1890s. Currently, she is working on The Victorian Invention of Old Age , a book-length study of Victorian attitudes toward late life with special emphasis on the interplay of ideas about generational conflicts and conflicts arising from imperialism. She is also preparing an edition of Flora Annie Steel's 1897 novel about the Indian "Mutiny" of 1857, On the Face of the Waters , for Broadview Press.
Email: teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-0323
Fax: 319-335-2535
Roberta M. Marvin
Dr. Marvin is
an Adjunct Associate Professor in International Programs. She is the founder and co-director of the Opera Studies Group through which she has organized seminars and lecture series under the sponsorship of IP and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Marvin's Ph.D. is in musicology. With a research focus in Italian opera in the nineteenth century, she has published widely on the music of Verdi and Rossini, specifically on issues of textual criticism, nationalism, dissemination, and sociological function, in both music and interdisciplinary journals. She is co-editor of Verdi 2001: Proceedings of the International Conference (2003); Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations (2004); and Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works in Music Drama (forthcoming).Her current projects are a book on Verdi and the Victorians, which explores the censorship, performance, and reception of the composer's music in nineteenth-century London; and a critical edition and historical study of Verdi's Inno delle nazioni (supported by an NEH Fellowship).
Email: roberta-marvin@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-2823
Adriana Méndez Rodenas
Adriana Méndez Rodenas is a professor in the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Adriana Méndez Rodenas received her PhD from Cornell University. Her areas of expertise are nineteenth and twentieth century Latin American narrative, Caribbean literature, travel writing, and transatlantic studies. A National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2002-2003) supported research for Transatlantic Pilgrims: Women Travelers to Nineteenth-Century Latin America, a book on centered on women’s travels to Latin America and the Caribbean during the period of nation formation.
She is currently at work on a new research project on the representation of Nature in 19th century travel writing and 20th century fiction called From Paradise to Diaspora: Nature in the Latin American Imaginary. A Stanley-Obermann Center International Research Fellowship supported travel to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris during summer 2007 to research the first stage of this project, which was presented as a lecture at the Picturing Eden exhibition, UI Museum of Art, in February, 2007.
John S. Nelson
Dr. Nelson is Professor of Political Science and Editor of Poroi, an interdisciplinary ejournal on rhetoric in culture, inquiry, and politics. He also holds faculty appointments in International Programs and the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa. Nelson's teaching includes English and Continental theories of politics and communication from the Renaissance and Reformation to the present. His books include Video Rhetorics (1997) and Tropes of Politics (1998). His current work analyzes political mythmaking in electronic cultures, with special attention to advertising and cinema.
Email: john-nelson@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-2349
Fax: 319-335-3400
H. Glenn Penny
Dr. Penny is Assistant Professor of History. His research and teaching focus on the relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans over the last 200 years. His first book, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) explored the international market of material culture that took shape around large collecting museums in Europe during the nineteenth century. He has also edited a volume together with Anthropologist Matti Bunzl, German Anthropology during the Age of Empire (University of Michigan Press, 2003) and is currently working on The German Love Affair with the American Indian, a book-length study of the German fascination with Native Americans over the last 200 years.
Email: h-penny@uiowa.edu
Jennifer Sessions
Jennifer Sessions is Assistant Professor of History. Her research and teaching interests center on modern European cultural and colonial history, especially the relationships between France and its overseas empire and between culture and politics. She is currently working on a book, Empire Reinvented: Colonialism and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century France and Algeria, that uses archival, literary and visual sources to trace the origins of the French settler colony in Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century.
Jae-Jae Spoon
Jae-Jae Spoon is Assistant Professor of Political Science. Her research and teaching focus on European politics, political parties, elections, and representation. She is especially interested in green and other small parties. Her current projects focus on small party behavior in the European Parliament, the effect of ballot structure on party strategies, and a book manuscript on the strategic behavior of the French and British Green parties.
Email: jae-jae-spoon@uiowa.edu.
Phone: 319-335-0901
Downing Thomas
Dr. Thomas is Professor of French and Chair of the Department of French & Italian. Teaching courses ranging from an introduction to graduate studies in French to topics in eighteenth-century French literature, Professor Thomas's most recent course on France and the U.S. explores how cultural understandings (and misunderstandings) shape the ways in which they view others and their cultures. He is author of Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and articles on topics ranging from early-modern language theory to Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro and Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro . His current project examines the question of taste and aesthetic judgment in early-modern France and England.
Email: downing-thomas@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-2253
Jim Throgmorton
A Professor of Urban and Regional Planning. His work focuses primarily on the roles of rhetoric and narrative in planning, especially with regard to making cities more just and ecologically sustainable. He is the author of Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago's Electric Future (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and co-editor (with Barbara Eckstein) of Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities (The MIT Press, 2003). He is currently working on a critical history of planning in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1890 to the present, as juxtaposed against planning in Berlin, Germany.
Email: james-throgmorton@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-335-0037
Photos by Professor Throgmorton
View photos by Professor Throgmorton.
Russell Scott Valentino
Dr. Valentino is associate professor of Russian and Comparative Literature and Interim Executive Director of the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI). His books include the novel Materada, translated from the Italian of Fulvio Tomizza (2000); Persuasion and Rhetoric, co-translated with Cinzia Sartini Blum from the Italian of Carlo Michelstaedter (2004); two books of experimental essays translated from the Croatian of Predrag Matvejevic, Between Exile and Asylum: An Eastern Epistolary (2005) and The Other Venice: Secrets of the City (2007); the novel A Castle in Romagna, co-translated from Igor Stikss Croatian original with Tomislav Kuzmanovic (2005); The Silence of the Sufi, translated from the Russian of Sabit Madaliev (2006); and the forthcoming novel Anima Mundi, co-translated with Cinzia Blum from the Italian of Susanna Tamaro.
He is also the author of the monograph Vicissitudes of Genre in the Russian Novel (2001), as well as essays, translated fiction, and poetry, from Italian, Croatian, and Russian, in journals such as The Iowa Review, Two Lines, Circumference, Asia, Poroi, and 91st Meridian. He is the recipient of a 2002 NEA Literature Fellowship and a 2004 Howard Foundation Fellowship, both for literary translation, as well two Fulbright research awards to Croatia (1993-94 and 1999-2000). He is the founder and director of the non-profit independent press Autumn Hill Books, which publishes contemporary literature from around the world in English translation. He teaches in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures and in the Translation Workshop of the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature.
Email: russell-valentino@uiowa.edu
Phone: 319-353-2193
Adrien Katherine Wing
Dr. Wing is the Bessie Dutton Murray Professor of Law and the Associate Dean of Faculty Development. She is also the Director of the law school's summer program in Arcachon, France. She is a member of the International and Comparative Law Program at the law school and teaches Law in the Muslim World and International Human Rights. Her nearly 100 publications include research on the French law banning the Muslim headscarves in the public schools. Her research interests include discrimination against European Muslims, especially women.
She is editor of Critical Race Feminism and Global Critical Race
Feminism, both from NYU Press.
Email: adrien-wing@uiowa.edu
410 Boyd Law Building.
Phone: 319-335-9129.