The following publications completed with assistance from Obermann programming were reported in the last year:
Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa during the Long Civil Rights Era
University of Iowa Press, 2016
Lena M. Hill (English and African American Studies, CLAS) and Michael D. Hill (English and African American Studies, CLAS)
Lena Hill was a Spring 2015 Fellow-in-Residence; Michael Hill was a Fall 2014 Fellow-in-Residence.
“Lucidly written and intelligently conceived, Invisible Hawkeyes is a timely and important volume that introduces readers to the position held by the University of Iowa, a large, northern land grant university, in the drama of American racial transformation during the middle of the twentieth century. This vital and important work, recovering the lives of early black students at the university, makes even larger claims about the prominence of the Midwest in national conversations about race and African American art and artistic styles.” —Lawrence Jackson, author, The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934–1960
The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Marian Wilson-Kimber (School of Music, CLAS)
Wilson-Kimber was a Fall 2017 Fellow-in-Residence.
“In her fascinating and long-needed study, Wilson Kimber reconstitutes and interprets a set of pervasive but neglected practices that include not only elocution but also melodramatic performance, recitation in combination with music, and the activities of the verse speaking choir. In so doing, she helps to recover an elusive but crucial element of cultural history: the sound of women’s lives.” —Joan Shelley Rubin, author of Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America
The Accommodated Jew: English Antisemitism from Bede to Milton
Cornell University Press, 2016
Kathy Lavezzo (English, CLAS)
Lavezzo was a Fall 2015 Fellow-in-Residence.
“Focusing on space and place, Kathy Lavezzo powerfully illuminates how English writers wrestled with ‘accommodating’ Jews and Jewishness. This is an ambitious, closely argued, historically informed, and deeply engaging study, one that traverses almost a thousand years of English cultural and literary history, from Bede and Chaucer through Marlowe and Milton.” —James Shapiro, Columbia University, author of Shakespeare and the Jews
The Latina/o Midwest Reader: The Latina/o Experience in a Changing Midwest
University of Illinois Press, 2017
Edited by Omar Valerio-Jiménez, Claire F. Fox (English and Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS), Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez
Valerio-Jiménez, Fox, and Vaquera-Vásquez co-directed the 2013 Obermann Summer Seminar, Teaching the Latino Midwest.
“The Latina/o Midwest Reader is an engaging and much-needed collection of essays that examines historical and contemporary Latina and Latino place-making in the U.S. heartland. Valerio-Jiménez, Vaquera-Vásquez, and Fox have assembled a wide-ranging regional study of the field that is distinct in its cross-disciplinary scope with contributions from the social sciences, the humanities, and interdisciplinary studies. A valuable introduction to the old and new Midwest.” —Mérida Rúa, editor of Latino Urban Ethnography and the Work of Elena Padilla
Making Meaning by Making Connections
Springer, 2017
Kathy L. Schuh (Educational Psychology, College of Education)
Schuh was a Spring 2012 Fellow-in-Residence.
This book documents those first links that students make between content they learn in their classrooms and their prior experiences. Through six late-elementary school case studies these knowledge construction links are brought to life. The links of the students are often rich in describing who these individuals are, where they are in their learning process, and what is meaningful to them. Many times, these links point to what has been learned, both in and out of school, and the contexts when and where that learning took place. The mind as rhizome metaphor was used to guide the development and interpretation of the studies while the lens of Peircian semiotics provides an interpretation for these initial links. The resulting grounded theory is presented through a rich and extensive presentation of excerpts from classroom observations, student interviews, and a student writing activity and describes the varying types of student links, how the links were prompted, the relationships between what the students were learning and what they already knew, and specific types of in-school links.
The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics
Oxford University Press, 2017
Co-edited by Rebekah Kowal (Dance, CLAS)
Kowal was a Spring 2012 Fellow-in-Residence.
“In recent decades, dance has become a vehicle for querying assumptions about what it means to be embodied, in turn illuminating intersections among the political, the social, the aesthetical, and the phenomenological. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics edited by internationally lauded scholars Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Siegmund, and the late Randy Martin presents a compendium of newly-commissioned chapters that address the interdisciplinary and global scope of dance theory—its political philosophy, social movements, and approaches to bodily difference such as disability, postcolonial, and critical race and queer studies.
Comics Culture (book series)
Rutgers University Press
Edited by Corey Creekmur (Cinematic Arts and English, CLAS)
Creekmur directed the 2014–15 Comics Studies Working Group and co-directed the 2011 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Comics, Creativity, and Culture.
Volumes in the Comics Culture series explore the artistic, historical, social, and cultural significance of newspaper comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels, with individual titles devoted to focused studies of key titles, characters, writers, and artists throughout the history of comics; additional books in the series address major themes or topics in comics studies, including prominent genres, national traditions, and significant historical and theoretical issues.
