English Associate Professor Lori Branch receives NEH Summer Seminar grant

Friday, October 23, 2015

Lori BrnachLori Branch, Associate Professor of English, has been awarded a $139,000 NEH grant to teach a Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers in 2016 on "Postsecular Studies and the Rise of the English Novel, 1719-1897."

She will teach the seminar at the UI with her co-director, Mark Knight, of the University of Toronto. Andrew Williams, who earned his doctorate in English from the UI in 2015, as well as a bachelor's degree in English and psychology in 2002, is the seminar coordinator.

Branch joined the UI faculty in 2000. A prolific author who regularly is invited to give lectures and presentations, her research interests include Restoration and 18th-century British literature; religion & secularism; and literary theory and theology. To learn more about her work, visit her faculty page.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.