GWSS professors Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Teresa Mangum have been selected as "Dare to Discover" scholars, part of a series showcasing research at the University of Iowa through the Office of the Vice President for Research & Economic Development.

Gigi Durham is a Professor in Journalism & Mass Communication, and Gender, Women's & Sexuality studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

DARE TO QUESTION MEDIA:

Provocative media images of adolescent girls may help sell everything from magazines to cosmetics, but they also take a tremendous toll on girls’ physical, mental and emotional health.  That’s a finding of The Lolita Effect, a bestselling book by former journalist and UI faculty member Meenakshi Gigi Durham. Durham’s work in the School Journalism & Mass Communication centers on media and the politics of the body, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, race, and youth cultures. Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Critical Studies in Media Communication, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Women’s Studies in Communication. In addition to The Lolita Effect, she was co-editor, with Douglas M. Kellner, of Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks. Her book TechnoSex is forthcoming in 2016. She serves on the editorial boards of a number of scholarly journals, including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Communication, and she also served on the advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Children, Adolescents and the Media. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Teresa Award for feminist scholarship from the International Communication Association.

Teresa Mangum is the Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

DARE TO BRDIGE BOUNDARIES

When most people think about research at a large university, they may imagine women and men in white lab coats studying DNA, physicists calculating the movements of distant planets, or engineers trying to develop alternative energy. The contribution to society and culture of humanities scholarship can be overlooked—something Teresa Mangum is committed to preventing. Mangum works to bridge boundaries across the disciplines as director of the Obermann Center, an intellectual community that supports artists, scholars, and researchers as they unearth the past, explain and engage the present, and invent the future. The center is part of a two-year, $3 million Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project launched in 2014 called “Humanities Without Walls,” designed to create new avenues for innovative teaching and scholarship in the humanities. And in early 2015, with Mangum’s help as co-principal investigator, the University of Iowa and Grinnell College received a $1.6 million grant from The Mellon Foundation to develop humanities-centered collaborations that expand the use of digital technology among faculty and students.