Kirsten E. Kumpf Baele is director of the Anne Frank Initiative and a faculty member in the Department of German. Kumpf Baele holds a PhD in German. Some of Kumpf Baele’s recent articles have been published by Amsterdam University Press, Utah Foreign Language Review, LIT Verlag, McFarland, and Bloomsbury. Child and youth voices and agency (placemaking, opposition, and peacemaking), trees in literature and the arts, and the making of cultural icons drive her scholarship and teaching In 2022, Kumpf Baele’s application brought the 13th Anne Frank Sapling in the United States to the University of Iowa. This award resulted in a year-long series of campus and community events which included the Provost’s Global Forum “Teaching Anne Frank” for which she was a grant co-recipient and the April 29, 2022 planting ceremony on the UI Pentacrest. She is currently serving as co-editor of and contributing author to the volume Teaching Anne Frank & Other Difficult Life Stories. Kumpf Baele’s newest research projects look at adolescents’ diaristic modes of writing through the lens of ecobiography. A part of this undertaking intends to shed light on a specific youth correspondence project—an international postcard-writing initiative in connection with a newly acquired rail car at the Danville Station in Danville, Iowa that builds on the 1929 letter exchange between Anne Frank and Iowa youth, Juanita Wagner. In the classroom, Kumpf Baele is committed to combining learning goals and community service projects in ways that enrich student growth and the common good. In this sense, her focus on community engagement draws parallels with and calls attention to the “helper figure” (the upstander).

Aron Aji, Director of MFA in Literary Translation, has joined the faculty in 2014. A native of Turkey, he has translated works by Bilge Karasu, Murathan Mungan, Elif Shafak, LatifeTekin, and other Turkish writers, including Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, (2004 National Translation Award); and A Long Day’s Evening, (NEA Literature Fellowship; short-list, 2013 PEN Translation Prize). His forthcoming translations include Ferid Edgü’s Wounded Age and Eastern Tales (NYRB, 2022), and Mungan’s Tales of Valor (co-translated with David Gramling) (Global Humanities Translation Prize, Northwestern UP, 2022). Aji was president of The American Literary Translators Association between 2016-2019. He leads the Translation Workshop, and teaches courses on retranslation, poetry and translation; theory, and contemporary Turkish literature.