Teresa Mangum, director of the Obermann Center, has been elected Secretary of the National Humanities Alliance Board of Directors, the largest humanities advocacy group in the country, located in Washington, D.C.
The president of the board is David Marshall, Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of California-Santa Barbara. Mangum will be replacing Pauline Yu, the President of the American Council of Learned Societies.
Mangum, Ph.D., attended this year’s advocacy meeting and visited Iowa senators and representatives in D.C. on March 15, along with three UI graduate students: Michelle Taylor, an English student finishing her dissertation while working for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities; Noaquia Callahan, a history student with a dissertation fellowship at the Institute for German History; and Sylvea Hollis, a history student finishing her dissertation while working as the Coordinator of the Center for the Future of Museums, a program at the American Alliance of Museums. (The students and Mangum are pictured above with William "Bro" Adams, director of the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
A Professor in Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies, Mangum was appointed as Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in 2010. She is the author of Married, Middle-brow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998); editor of A Cultural History of Women: Volume 5: The Age of Empire, 1800-1920 (Berg 2013); and guest editor of special issues of Philological Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Periodicals Review, and the Journal of Aging Studies. With Anne Valk of Brown University, she co-edits the book series Humanities and Public Life for the University of Iowa Press.
She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the ways that nineteenth-century British novels shaped readers’ understanding of women, of late life, and of connections between humans and other animals. She also publishes on current issues: publicly engaged pedagogy, the place of service in an academic career, and graduate student placement.
She is a member of the National Advisory Board and Executive Committee of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life; the Board of Directors of the National Humanities Alliance; and is secretary of the Women’s Council for the Modern Languages (affiliated with the Modern Language Association).
The Obermann Center is an intellectual community that supports artists, scholars, and researchers—independently and in cross-disciplinary collaborations—as they unearth the past, explain and engage the present, and invent the future.