2017 Summer Institute Participants

Carolyn Colvin

Affiliations within the College:
● Teaching and Learning
● English Education
● Language, Literacy and Culture Area(s) of Expertise
● Literacy Instruction for Immigrant Adult Students Academic History
● PhD in Reading, Writing, Language, Univ. of Nebraska/Lincoln, 1987
Awards and Professional Recognition”
● University of Iowa Liaison, Imagining America. 2015

Corinne Peek-Asa

Corinne Peek-Asa is the Associate Dean for Research of the University of Iowa, College of Public Health and Professor of Occupational and Environmental Health. She is the Director of the CDC-funded Injury Prevention Research Center and Directs the NIH-funded University of Iowa International Trauma and Violence Research Training program. Dr. Peek-Asa received her PhD in Epidemiology from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995 and after serving on the UCLA faculty for five years joined the University of Iowa in 2001. Her work focuses on the implementation and evaluation of programs and policies to prevent acute traumatic injuries and violence. She has current studies in the areas of community and family violence prevention, school bullying, workplace violence prevention, teen driving safety, bicycle safety, rural roadway design, international road traffic safety, and rural acute care. She has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Peek-Asa teaches graduate courses that have included a student-inquiry course on global road traffic safety, a service learning course working with local schools, as well as courses focused on public health research and policy. Dr. Peek-Asa has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and is an appointed committee member of the Transportation Research Board. She helped establish, served on the Board of Advisors, and served as the President of the Society for the Advancement of Violence and Injury Research. She was named a ResearchAmerica! Public Health Hero in 2010.

Elana Buch

Sociocultural and medical anthropology, care, aging, disability, the body, labor, kinship, inequality, the aftermath of war, social policy; United States
My research examines the complex intersections of caregiving and power in later life. Drawing on approaches from medical anthropology, social work and feminist anthropology, my work examines the ways that emerging forms of care and everyday care practices shape both intimate and political social relations. I am particularly interested in the ways that care practices naturalize, reproduce or transform social inequalities. My research focuses on the United States, where discourses of productivity and independence crucially shape the social roles and forms of care available to older and disabled adults.

Eli Asikin-Garmager

Eli Asikin-Garmager is a research fellow at the University of Iowa, and will complete his PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science of Language Certificate in May 2017. In 2016, as a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellow, he carried out eight months of research in Eastern Indonesia on the Sasak language. He studied structural variation in Sasak dialects, and factors that contribute to speakers’ linguistic choices. He has recently piloted a digital humanities project that aims to increase community involvement in creating written and audio records of under-studied languages. Eli has more than a decade of experience teaching English and working with language instructors in the US, Costa Rica, and Indonesia, and he is currently collaborating on Language Learner Histories. This project brings a user experience approach to language classroom design by documenting the language learning experiences of diverse populations through interviews and personal narratives. The result will be an online database that can be used to better understand how teaching pedagogy interacts with learners’ previous experiences and cultural backgrounds.

Elke Heckner

Elke Heckner teaches in the German Department. She is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled, “Thinking Memories of Futurity: Holocaust, Genocide and 9/11.” Her recent articles in Shofar and New German Critique examine issues of second-generation witnessing and post-memory in film and memorial architecture. She is also revising a second book project “Performing Terror: Unruly Bodies, Gender, and Modernity,” for publication, which traces the genealogy and epistemology of (gender) terrorism in canonical texts of German modernity (such as Hegel’s master-slave dialectic).

https://clas.uiowa.edu/dwllc/german/people/elke-heckn

Emily Mester

University of Iowa Graduate Student in the English Department

Jessica Welburn

Professor Welburn’s research interests include race and ethnicity, social mobility, urban inequality, cultural sociology and qualitative research methods. Her work has focused on the experiences of African Americans in the post-Civil Rights era, including how they conceptualize their social mobility prospects and their strategies for navigating persistent racism and discrimination. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Keep on Pushin’ that uses in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations to explore how working class and middle class African Americans in Detroit, MI navigate the city’s crumbling infrastructure. In addition, Professor Welburn is working on a book manuscript co-authored with Michèle Lamont, Joshua Guetzkow, Hanna Herzog, Nissim Mizrachi, Elisa Reis and Graziella Silva. The book draws upon over 400 qualitative interviews to compare the destigmatization strategies of blacks in the United States, blacks in Brazil, and several groups — Ethiopian Jews, Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Citizens of Israel — in Israel.

Elizabeth Heineman

Lisa Heineman has been at the UI since 1999 and teaches courses in 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, including “The Hour of Women: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity” American Historical Review (1996). With her 2002 article, “Sexuality and Nazism: The Doubly Unspeakable?” (Journal of the History of Sexuality), she began to work more intensely on the history of sexuality. In 2011, she published Before Porn was Legal: The Erotica Empire of Beate Uhse (University of Chicago Press) (Listen to a New Books in History podcast interview regarding this book here) and The History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights (editor, University of Pennsylvania Press). She is also author of the memoir Ghostbelly (Feminist Press, 2014).

Jiyeon Kang

Jiyeon Kang is assistant professor of communication studies and Korean studies at the University of Iowa. Her research interests include Internet activism, youth culture, and globalization. Her recent book, Igniting the Internet: Youth and Activism in Postauthoritarian South Korea, examines a decade of Internet activism in South Korea by combining textual analysis of online communities with ethnographic interviews. Her research has appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Quarterly Journal of Speech Communication, Journal of Korean Studies, and Global Networks.

 Joyce Tsai

Joyce Tsai is a specialist in modern and contemporary art whose work focuses on the recurrent artistic engagement with abstraction from the 19th to the 21st century. Her current book project examines the persistence of painting in the work of László Moholy-Nagy. In addition to her training in the history of art, she also earned an MA in German with an emphasis on realism, critical theory and aesthetic philosophy. Her interests include the history of photography, art conservation and conservation science, and the European avant-garde.

Tsai has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Dedalus Foundation, and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Juan Pablo Hourcade

Juan Pablo Hourcade is an Associate Professor at the University of Iowa’s Department of Computer Science, UI3 Associate Director for Informatics Education, and a member of the Delta Center. His main area of research is Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on the design, implementation and evaluation of technologies that support creativity, collaboration, well-being, healthy development, and information access for a variety of users, including children and older adults.

Dr. Hourcade is in the Editorial Board of Interacting with Computers,Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, and theInternational Journal of Child-Computer Interaction. He is editor of the Universal Interactions forum for interactions magazine.

Kim Marra

Kim Marra is Professor of Theatre Arts and American Studies, Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre Arts, and an affiliate faculty member in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Her books include Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in American Theatre, 1865-1914 (2006, winner of the Callaway Prize), and the co-edited volumes Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History (1998), its sequel Staging Desire (2002), The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy (2005), and Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power (2017). She wrote and performed the autobiographical solo piece “Horseback Views,” which is published in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (2014). Her prize-winning article about that performance as research, “Riding, Scarring, Knowing: A Queerly Embodied Performance Historiography,” appears in Theatre Journal (December 2012). Her other horse-related essays appear in TDR: The Drama Review and the edited volumes Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater and Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices. She is currently an associate editor of the Animal Lives Series of the University of Chicago Press.

Kyle Rector

Kyle Rector is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa in the Department of Computer Science. She has research interests in Human-Computer Interaction and Accessibility. More specifically, she is interested in developing Eyes-Free Technologies that enhance quality of life, including exercise and art technologies for people who are blind or low vision. She is a Google PhD Fellow (2015), an NSF Graduate Research Fellow (2012-2015), a Google Anita Borg Scholar (2010), and a Palantir Scholarship for Women in Technology Semi-Finalist (2013). Her research has been recently covered by MIT Technology Review, Microsoft, Gizmag, GeekWire, and c|net. Kyle received her BS from Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science from Oregon State University (2010) and her MS and PhD from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, co-advised by Julie Kientz and Richard Ladner (2016).

Leslie Ann Locke

Leslie Ann Locke earned her Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Administration with an emphasis in sociology (race and ethnic studies), as well as a graduate certificate in Advanced Research Methods with a focus on qualitative methodology from Texas A&M University in 2011. Her research interests include the K12-higher education pipeline and issues of social justice and equity for students from traditionally marginalized groups. She is currently examining early college programs (partnerships between institutions of higher education and K12 schools) as social justice policy interventions in education.

Naomi Greyser

Naomi Greyser is associate professor of Rhetoric and English at the University of Iowa and executive director of Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI). Her work in critical race and gender theory; affect studies and the new materialism; the rhetorical arts; and critical university studies has appeared in American Literature, American Quarterly and Feminist Studies. Her first book, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2017. Greyser is currently researching the psychic, socio-political and institutional dimensions of writer’s block, drawing on her work as a writing coach at the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Writing Through Writer’s Block book argues that the neoliberal university promotes writer’s block as it counterproductively demands “productivity,” and maps unjust distributions of block and flow in the raced, classed, gendered terrain of a post-Fordist American Academy.