Books published by University of Iowa Press

University of Iowa legend Willard L. ""Sandy"" Boyd is a proud middle westerner. His decades of service to the university began in 1954, when he arrived as a law professor. This memoir, interspersed with personal wisdom gleaned over more than six decades of leadership, encapsulates his optimistic view of the public university as an institution.

The American Progressive Era is generally regarded as a dynamic period of political reform and social activism. In this volume, editors bring together scholars in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre studies to examine the burst of diverse performance venues and styles of the time, revealing how they shaped national narratives surrounding immigration and urban life.

What does it mean, this book asks, to translate a Jazz Age blockbuster from book to film or stage? What adjustments are necessary and what is lost? Bethany Wood examines three well-known stories that debuted as women's magazine serials and traces how each of these narratives traveled across publishing, theatre, and film through adaptation.

Covering the period from Disney's purchase through the release of The Force Awakens, the book reveals how fans anticipated, interpreted, and responded to the steady stream of production stories, gossip, marketing materials, merchandise, and other sources in the build-up to the movie's release.

With calm abandon, Rob Schlegel stands among the genderless trees to shake notions of masculinity and fatherhood. Schlegel incorporates the visionary into everyday life, inhabiting patterns of relation that do not rely on easy categories.

Between the world wars, several labour colleges sprouted up across the US. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause. As Mary McAvoy reveals, a big part of that learning experience centered on the schools' drama programs.

Explores online fan spaces in search of ""Janeites"" all over the world to discover what fans are making, how fans are sharing their work, and why it matters that so many women and non-binary individuals find a haven not only in Jane Austen, but also in Jane Austen fandom.

In July 1976, a 24 year-old white woman, Margo Olson, was found in a grave in Stamford, Connecticut, with an arrow piercing through her heart. A few weeks later, Howie Carter, her black boyfriend, was killed by the police. Looking back at what might have happened, the author discovers a Bicentennial year steeped in recession, racism, and violence.

At the edge of a field a thought waits"", writes Cassie Donish, in her collection that explores the conflicting diplomacies of body and thought while stranding us in a field, in a hospital, on a shoreline. These are poems that assess and dwell in a sensual, fantastically queer mode.

Blends both the personal and the historical to complicate our understanding of the development of the Midwest, while also serving as a testament to the resilience of the Dakota and other indigenous peoples who have lived in this region from time immemorial.

Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between US and Soviet forces.

Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, Kendra Allen's collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues.

Greg Hoch combines natural history, land management, scientific knowledge, and personal observation to examine one of the oddest birds in North America. Woodcock have a complex life history and the management of their habitat is also complex. The health of this bird can be considered a key indicator of what good forests look like.

More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far Washington D.C.'s Arena Stage could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power.

An examination of the ways in which the theatre after World War II has presented different aspects of the French Revolution and the Holocaust. The book shows that by ""performing history"" actors - as witnesses for the departed witnesses - bring the historical past and theatrical present together.

Rukmini Pande's examination of race in fan studies will make an immediate contribution to the growing field. Until now, virtually no sustained examination of race and racism in transnational fan cultures has taken place, a lack that is concerning given that current fan spaces have never been more vocal about issues of privilege and discrimination.

Humanities scholars, in general, often have a difficult time explaining why their work matters, and eighteenth-century literary scholars are no exception. To remedy this problem, Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt offer this collection of essays to defend the field's relevance and demonstrate its ability to help us understand current events.

Examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one's identity. Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time, Tim Cassedy shows how each put language at the centre of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era's linguistic ideas.

Shedding light on the importance of collaborative creative public projects, Contested City bridges art, design, community activism, and urban history. This is a book for artists, planners, scholars, teachers, cultural institutions, and all those who seek to collaborate in new ways with communities.

From baby boomers to millennials, attending a big music festival has basically become a cultural rite of passage in America. In Half a Million Strong, music writer and scholar Gina Arnold explores the history of large music festivals in America and examines their impact on American culture.

In the spirit of Tove Jansson, William Blake, and Calvin & Hobbes, The Lightning Jar contains a volatile mix of innocence and experience, faith and doubt, nostalgia and a sense of all there is to gain by accepting reality on fresh terms.

Set on the coast of Maine and in the high desert of New Mexico in the late 1970s through the early '80s, Buddhism for Western Children is a universal and timeless story of a boy who must escape subjugation, tell his story, and reclaim his soul.

After the second World War, ""technology"" came to signify both the anxieties of possible annihilation in a changing world and the exhilaration of accelerating cultural change. This book examines how some of the most well-known writers of the era described the tensions between technical, literary, and media cultures at the dawn of the Digital Age.

Was it a crater or a sinkhole?"" asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin's Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation.

Provides the first in-depth study of the historic American Negro Theatre (ANT) and its lasting influence on American popular culture. Founded in 1940 in Harlem, the ANT successfully balanced expressions of African American consciousness with efforts to gain white support for the burgeoning civil rights movement.

We live in a world of talk. Yet Race Sounds argues that we need to listen more - not just hear things, but actively listen - particularly in relation to how we engage race, gender, and class differences. Forging new ideas about the relationship between race and sound, Furlonge explores how black artists imagine listening.

Makes a formidable intervention into the emerging field of ecopoetics. The volume's essays model new and provocative methods for reading twentieth and twenty-first century ecological poetry and poetics, drawing on the insights of ecocriticism, contemporary philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, black studies, Native studies, critical race theory, and disability studies, among others.

Alicia Mountain's urgent and astonishing debut collection maps a new queer landscape through terrain alive and sensual, defiant and inviting. With a voice that beckons while it howls, Mountain nimbly traverses lyric, confessional, and narrative modes, leaving groundbreaking tracks for us to follow.

Reckons with fatherhood, the violence of nostalgia, poetry, and the commodity world of visual art as the poems here frantically cycle through responses to the speaker's son's remark on a painting by Julian Schnabel that it "looks like garbage."

With their extravagant musicality, Triplett's poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled "supply chain" that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world.