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Four CLAS faculty honored with new named professorships in classics
September 25, 2023
By Charlotte Brookins
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recently honored four faculty members with two named associate professorships that will last five years—helping them advance their research and work studying ancient civilizations.
These appointments were previously held for four years each by John Finamore, who retired in spring of 2022.
Bob Cargill, of the Department of Classics, and Brenda Longfellow, of the School of Art and Art History, were named Roger A. Hornsby Associate Professor in the Classics, and Sarah Bond of the Department of History, and Paul Dilley of the Departments of Religious Studies and Classics, were named Erling B. "Jack" Holtsmark Associate Professor in the Classics.
Named faculty positions and professorships honor the academic achievements of faculty while recognizing the generosity of donors to the academic enterprise. Four of the nine CLAS faculty members recently recognized with named professorships are doing work related to the classics.
All four professors come from varying backgrounds and areas of expertise, promoting a unique interdisciplinary approach to the prestigious appointments in the classics.
Professor Craig Gibson, who chairs the Department of Classics, is optimistic about the positive impact these appointments will have on the university.
“These four professors have known each other and worked together for more than a decade,” says Gibson. “With the generous research funding that these named appointments provide, they will be able to advance their own projects, collaborate with each other and with scholars around the world, and promote the University of Iowa as a major Midwest destination for the study of the ancient Mediterranean world.”
Bob Cargill, Paul Dilley, Sarah Bond, and Brenda Longfellow, received named professorships in the classics.
Roger A. Hornsby Associate Professor in the Classics
Bob Cargill
One of two recipients of the Hornsby appointment is Bob Cargill, who teaches biblical studies and biblical archaeology in the classics department.
“I was pleasantly surprised by the announcement,” says Cargill. “I had no idea I was being considered for this named professorship, so when I got the letter from the dean, I was honored.”
Cargill, who came to the University of Iowa in 2011, says he was drawn to Iowa City for its sense of community and how welcoming it was, as well as its focus on public education. He enjoys having the opportunity to give back to students with similar backgrounds to him or facing similar struggles.
“There is a lot I still want to accomplish here at Iowa, including building a robust biblical studies program in the Department of Classics and helping to establish a Jewish studies program,” Cargill adds. “I’m happy when I’m doing hard work trying to make the world a better place for my students and my own kids.”
Brenda Longfellow
Brenda Longfellow, who is appointed in the School of Art and Art History, specializes in art history with a special regard to the art, architecture, and hydraulics of the ancient Roman Empire. She is the second recipient of the Hornsby associate professorship. When she heard the news, Longfellow said she was happily taken aback.
“I was so pleased to be recognized with this,” she says. “It means a lot to me.”
Longfellow is especially appreciative of the university’s history of combining interests, especially regarding art history and the classics—two subjects Longfellow works with closely. She says it was this freedom, along with the university’s sense of support and community, that brought her to Iowa.
“I’m really impressed at the new professorships and the cohort of the four of us at the same time,” Longfellow continues. “It really reinforces that idea of classics as this place of good potential collaboration at the University of Iowa, and I look forward to seeing what we do over the next five years.”
Erling B. "Jack" Holtsmark Associate Professor in the Classics
Sarah Bond
Sarah Bond is one of two faculty members appointed to the Holtsmark Associate Professorship from her role as an associate professor of history. She says she is especially excited about the broadening scholarship under the topic of classics.
“I believe the future of classics is in global antiquity rather than classics as something narrowly defined,” explains Bond. “We need to expand our view of the ancient world beyond just Italy and Greece; if classics is to survive, it needs something that is globally understood, so I believe the future of classics is looking at places like North Africa, India, China, and Mesopotamia.”
Bond says she was drawn to the University of Iowa for its support of the digital humanities, as well as the community offered by the Iowa City area. She was especially appreciative of the dedication of such a large public university toward educating students about the ancient world.
“All of us are very honored by these five-year appointments, but it isn’t about the prestige of the professorship,” Bond concludes. “It’s about reinvesting in the student population. It isn’t about the title, but what you can do with it.”
Paul Dilley
Paul Dilley was notified of his new appointment as a Holtsmark Associate Professor in the Classics at the end of August, which he holds alongside a joint appointment in religious studies.
“It was a very pleasant surprise,” says Dilley on the appointment. “I am incredibly happy for the acknowledgment and extra support of research. It was certainly a nice thing to hear.”
Dilley came to Iowa in 2011 and cites the university’s long-standing religious studies department and classics department for what drew him to the position. He is especially appreciative of Iowa’s dedication to the digital humanities, both on the graduate the undergraduate level.
“It’s a rarity to find such great undergrad, grad, and doctoral programs in both of my fields,” Dilley says.
Dilley is looking forward to incorporating his experience in the digital humanities into his new named appointment in the classics department.
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CLAS chemistry professor recognized for impact in STEM education with national award
September 25, 2023
By: Emily Delgado
Renée Cole, professor and DEO of the Department of Chemistry in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was recognized for her work in chemistry education with a national award sponsored by the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society.
Cole, along with two collaborators, will be awarded the 2023 James Flack Norris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry during a ceremony this November in Boston.
Cole worked with Juliette Lantz, a chemistry professor at Drew University, and Suzanne Ruder, a chemistry professor at Virginia Commonwealth University on the award-winning project, Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) Project.
“We've developed resources that faculty across the world actually can use to better support students in developing the skills used in STEM fields,” Cole says.
This award, established in 1950, is the first national award for outstanding achievement in the teaching of chemistry. It recognizes educators at any level who have had a “wide-ranging effect on chemical education,” according to the American Chemical Society.
The project team is being recognized for its development of curriculum materials and rubrics to help guide STEM instruction toward more active, collaborative learning, while also giving students feedback on their skills.
Cole helped develop materials and resources that allow students and faculty from STEM fields to assess their ability to think critically, solve problems, and communicate effectively.
“The ELIPSS project answers the question of how to assess chemistry skills because one of the things we know that drives student learning is what you assess,” Cole adds.
Cole, whose research focuses on productive and successful ways to teach chemistry and other STEM subjects, says the reason she came to Iowa in 2011 was because of the support she received from the university and chemistry department.
“The UI has done a lot of work in establishing the chemistry department and understanding the value of chemistry education research,” Cole explains.
Cole says she has received support and praise from faculty in her department and the university about the research she is doing, with some colleagues approaching her for advice on how they can improve their instruction and courses. She says it is gratifying to see her work making a difference for STEM instruction at Iowa.
“Being able to see where the CLAS policies are changing to encourage better practice, or that are much more visible and explicit now than it was when I first was hired at Iowa, has been fantastic to see,” Cole says. “Seeing changes in instructional practices to better support student outcomes, including at the institutional and national policy level, encourages me to stay involved.”
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Celebrating our faculty: 2023 CLAS faculty awards
September 19, 2023
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CLAS staff: Apply now for Mary Louise Kelly Professional Development Award
September 18, 2023
By Charlotte Brookins
The Mary Louise Kelly Professional Development Award is once again open for applications.
The award provides funding for staff in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to pursue professional development opportunities, including training, coursework, conventions, and more.
Applications close Friday, Nov. 10.
Among prior recipients of the Mary Louise Kelly Award is Claire Frances, director of the Center for Language and Culture Learning in the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.
“Staff professional development is very important, especially in fields that work in providing technical and instructional support for language and culture learning, as I do,” explains Frances. “I think it’s important to remain professionally relevant and to collaborate with colleagues who are doing the same work at other institutions.”
To qualify, staff members must be employed in a permanent full-time or part-time position with CLAS, and applications must be submitted prior to the event they wish to attend. Submissions will be judged based on the appropriateness of the proposed budget, as well as the presented objectives of and justifications for the event they intend to attend.
Applications will be evaluated by the CLAS staff council, staff recognition committee, and the dean.
Selected staff members will receive up to $500 in funding, have their names published on the CLAS staff awards website, and be honored at the annual CLAS staff recognition ceremony in the spring.
Frances, who received the award last year, used the funding to attend two professional development events: the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) Conference and the International Association for Language Learning Technology (IALLT) Conference.
At CALICO, she presented a Can-Do Self-Assessment App, which she and her colleague Giovanni Zimotti developed with the support of an Innovations in Teaching with Technology Award. She was also the Henderson Plenary Speaker at IALLT, where she showcased Iowa Intersections, a multilingual oral history project dedicated to connecting with local community members in their native languages.
“The Mary Lousie Kelly award was very helpful in getting me to both of these events,” says Frances. “The ability to network and to connect with other leaders in the field helps give me new ideas on how to innovate in the teaching, learning, and assessment of languages.”
Eligible CLAS staff, especially those who are interested in furthering their education through professional development opportunities, are encouraged to apply for the Mary Louise Kelly Award.
For more information on eligibility and to apply, visit the CLAS human resources webpage.
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UI holds top writing programs in ‘US News’ rankings of best universities
September 18, 2023
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CLAS smashes research funding records
September 11, 2023
By Katie Linder
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences set a record for total research funds awarded during fiscal year 2023, with $118 million—surpassing the previous record of $81 million, set just two years earlier.
The University of Iowa as a whole secured more than $704 million in external funding during the last fiscal year. Researchers and scholars across the university brought in more than $363 million in federal funding, a 16.5 percent increase over FY22.
CLAS contributed nearly a third of that through its record-setting year for grants.
The TRACERS impact
University-wide funding from NASA exceeded $75 million, with most of it supporting researchers located in the college’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. More than $67 million was from the NASA-funded TRACERS project, previously led by the late Craig Kletzing, which is the largest grant ever received by the University of Iowa.
While TRACERS funding made up a large portion of the grant dollars received in the college, if you take it out of the total, CLAS funding is still growing.
CLAS is earning larger, more competitive grants
Joshua Weiner
Total awarded dollars weren’t the only thing up in FY23; total proposed grant dollars came in at more than $151 million, surpassing the previous record of $143 million set just last year. Faculty in the college are applying for—and being awarded—larger grants more frequently. This comes even as the total number of tenure-track faculty in the college has decreased by 18 percent over the last decade. The college is currently averaging about $200,000 per year in grant funding per tenured-track faculty member, compared to $65,000 about a decade ago.
The college is also seeing more interest from major agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and other substantial federal funders, especially through interdisciplinary and cross-department grants that can utilize the size of the college and the strength of the greater University of Iowa campus for their projects.
“Our faculty are applying for, and being awarded, larger, more complex grants” Joshua Weiner, CLAS associate dean for research, said. “It’s exciting to see the impact these dollars will have at the university and in our college—but most importantly on the advancements in scholarship and innovation across disciplines.”
Last fiscal year, CLAS faculty across many disciplines brought in substantial grants of $1 million or more, for example:
- NIH R01 grant: “Pregnancy 24/7 Offspring Study,” Kara Whitaker, HHP, $3.2M
- NIH R01 grant: “Neural circuits and mechanisms underlying active and passive stress coping,” Jason Radley, PBS, $3.3M
- Department of Defense grant: “Identifying and Measuring User and Platform Vulnerabilities to Strategic Information Operations,” Brian Ekdale, SJMC, $1.7M
- Department of Defense grant: “Preclinical development of use-dependent, selective blockers of GluA2-lacking AMPA receptors to prevent noise-induced neurodegeneration," Steven Green, Biology, $1.3M
- Department of Education grant: “National Resource Center for Translation and Global Literacy,” Aron Aji, DWLLC, $1M
The power of grant support
Carmen Langel
The CLAS Grant Support Office has been instrumental in helping faculty acquire larger, more competitive grants as its staff helps with the front and back ends of the application process. “The larger the application, the more complicated it is. Our staff members are helping pull important information together on a rigid and often tight deadline,” explains Carmen Langel, CLAS grant support office director. “Our team’s work and support are important in helping our talented faculty members go after and secure these impressive grants.”
Strong grantsmanship by faculty in several STEM fields, including the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Communication Sciences and Disorders, Computer Science, Health and Human Physiology, Physics and Astronomy, and Psychological and Brain Sciences, especially helped drive up the college’s total dollars awarded over the last five years.
Support from the GSO office and strong faculty grantsmanship is making a difference—as the chart above shows, the college's ten-year average of about $40 million in research funding began to go up immediately following CLAS' strategic investments in a centralized grant support staff starting in 2018.
FY23 ended on June 30, 2023, and just a few months into FY24, leaders in the college are already feeling optimistic about another strong year for research funding in CLAS.
“Two months in and the college is already off to a strong start with $15 million awarded to CLAS faculty,” Weiner said. “It should be another impressive research year for the college, and our faculty and staff should feel really proud of that.”
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Celebrate the new UI Libraries exhibit "Hey Buddy, I'm Bill" honoring the life of Bill Sackter
September 11, 2023
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CLAS doctoral student using 3D imaging to reconstruct Ancient Roman grottoes
September 11, 2023
By Charlotte Brookins
Myat Aung, a PhD student in the School of Art and Art History, has combined archeological research with the digital humanities to reconstruct natural and artificial grottoes from Ancient Rome as part of her dissertation.
Aung is in her final year of the program, which is housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Iowa. She specializes in Ancient Roman art and architecture.
Through the use of laser scanning and 3D digital modeling, Aung hopes to contextualize the historical environments by allowing people of the modern world to share in the sensory experience.
“I look at how art, architecture, water, and other natural features of these environments worked together to impact the human experience, as well as how ancient visitors interacted with these locations,” Aung describes. “I’m looking at them from a holistic view because these spaces are mostly in ruinous states, sometimes with things built over them, so this is a way for me to document the ancient world and also reconstruct it so modern audiences can experience and understand what the ancient visitors would have encountered.”
Left: Portrait of Myat Aung. Right: Drawings and tools Myat Aung used to measure the dimensions of the grotto and garden at Villa San Marco.
To create the reconstruction (shown below), Aung traveled to Castellammare di Stabia in southern Italy in 2017 as an independent researcher with the University of Maryland to document the Villa San Marco, a Roman coastal town on the Bay of Naples.
A LiDAR scan of part of the grotto to document the Villa San Marco.
Using LiDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, Aung scanned the site, which she later used in one of her digital 3D constructions. She also recorded sound on-site to accompany the scan and allow for sensory immersion.
“Monuments are becoming more and more digitized these days, and digital cultural heritage has become a big incentive for world heritage programs,” explains Aung. “People are trying to find ways to preserve ancient sites where structures are frequently unstable and, at times, blocked out, and you can’t really see what people experienced then. I’m trying to recapture these past experiences so that modern viewers can have a sense of what’s happened in the past.”
Aung, who came to Ripon College in Wisconsin from Myanmar in 2012, said she chose to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa because of its unique offerings in art, art history, and technology, as well as the close-knit nature of the community.
“The university is very open to ideas, and I’m able to explore different kinds of technologies with these digital models, something that I feel not a lot of art history departments have access to,” says Aung. “Everyone is so welcoming and supportive.”
Aung is especially grateful to her advisor Brenda Longfellow, who has played a major role in Aung’s research and her studies here at the university. Aung says she is looking forward to finishing up the last year of her PhD program and finalizing the research she has worked hard on.
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Meet three CLAS artists and researchers
September 11, 2023
By Izabela Zaluska
Faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are doing impactful and interesting work across disciplines. Learn more about the research and work of Stephanie DiPietro, Jasper Halekas, and Inara Verzemnieks.
Stephanie DiPietro is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology.
What is the focus of your work?
My research centers on the areas of life course criminology and immigrant/refugee studies, with a particular emphasis on how immigration shapes family dynamics, identity, and patterns of adaptation and behavior over time.
A major focus of this work is on the ways in which childhood exposure to war and genocide shapes developmental pathways over the life course. Much of my prior work focuses on the experiences of men and women who lived through the Bosnian war and genocide as children in the early 1990s.
Currently, I am working on a multi-site ethnographic project examining the experiences of immigrants and refugees from Sudan, Syria and Afghanistan.
Tell us about the broad impact you’d like your work to have.
The discipline of criminology has been curiously silent when it comes to the topic of war, so I hope to bring greater attention to the ways in which exposure to war imprints upon the life course, long after the end of conflict. More broadly, I hope my work will shed light on the unique challenges faced by immigrants and refugees coming from countries afflicted by war and political conflict, and will be of value to immigrant resettlement programs.
What excites you about the environment in CLAS?
The level of support for interdisciplinary work is one of the most exciting aspects of CLAS. In the short time I have been at the University of Iowa, I have met wonderful colleagues across a range of disciplines, from the social sciences to the humanities. It has been incredibly valuable to learn about their ongoing research and community outreach efforts with Iowa’s immigrant populations.
What are your hobbies and pursuits outside of work?
I love traveling and spending time outdoors with my husband and our two dogs. I am also an avid (and wildly unskilled) cartoonist.
Jasper Halekas is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Jasper Halekas
What is the focus of your work?
My research focuses on understanding the origins of the solar wind and its interactions with planets and moons. The solar wind is a flow of hot ionized gas (aka plasma) that is accelerated outward from the sun, reaching speeds of roughly a million miles per hour. This wind flows throughout our solar system, where it interacts with the magnetic fields, atmospheres, and sometimes the surfaces of planets and moons. The energy carried by the solar wind is significant, and it can even influence long-term planetary evolution.
We do not yet fully understand how the solar wind is accelerated, but with the new measurements being made now, our scientific community is coming ever closer to solving this puzzle. We are also making great progress in understanding the impacts of the solar wind on planetary systems. It is an exciting time to be in this field.
My group designs and builds spaceflight instruments to make high-fidelity charged particle measurements, and uses them to understand the fascinating plasma physics that occur in the interplanetary medium and the environments near the various bodies of our solar system. Our research spans the intersection between planetary science and pure space plasma physics, touching on planetary geology and atmospheres, magnetic reconnection, shocks, plasma sheaths, and plasma waves and turbulence. A unifying theme of our research is the use of charged particle measurements to remotely infer plasma processes.
Tell us about the broad impact you’d like your work to have.
I hope that my research contributes in some way to a better understanding of our universe. Science is fundamentally a process by which we build knowledge, and each researcher is a part of that process. I love my work, because each new project brings a new challenge — and I love to solve puzzles. If my research can contribute to new understanding, one small puzzle piece at a time, then I consider my career well spent.
What excites you about the environment in CLAS?
I truly appreciate being part of a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I firmly believe in the value of a liberal arts education, and I am glad that my department contributes to that mission. I look back on my own college education, and I am thankful that I had the opportunity to learn about subjects as diverse as physics, mathematics, computer science, geology, literature, folklore, religion, languages, etc. So, I am very happy to contribute to providing that formative experience for the next generation of students.
I am also grateful that we currently have fantastic leaders in our college who are working very hard to help us all succeed in our research and educational missions.
What are your hobbies and pursuits outside of work?
My ideal fall weekend day would include a morning trail run with my dog, spectating at my kids' soccer games, going for a family adventure in one of the nearby state/county parks, stopping for ice cream on the way home, and kicking back with a science fiction book or a show.
Inara Verzemnieks is an associate professor in the Department of English.
What is the focus of your work?
I write longform creative nonfiction that involves immersive research techniques. I’m often shuttling back and forth between trying to document the unfolding present — by embedding myself in places both nearby and far-flung, conducting interviews, and recording what is happening around me in real time — and then I’m also trying to reach as far back as I can through time to resurrect events that I could not have been present to witness but which I want to bring to life through archival research, trawling through documents and any other historical records I can get my hands on as a kind of portal to the past.
Using this approach, I’ve written magazine features, helped produce interactive multi-part online series, and books. For example, I’ve followed along with the residents of a small Iowa town as they’ve rebuilt following catastrophic flooding; I’ve reconstructed the history of Latvia in the centuries leading up to World War II, and traced the ripple effects of war’s aftermath through the lives of women in my family.
At the moment, I’m working on a history of soccer as told through portraits of famous and infamous players, that is also the story of failure and calamity and acceptance.
Tell us about the broad impact you’d like your work to have.
I want readers of my work to feel as if they’ve been given the equivalent of an invitation into a stranger’s living room, to feel the honor of witnessing the private sorrows and joys of our everyday lives as they are happening. I want to help make visible the often hidden process of “becoming,” those moments when we are faced with the pain and promise of challenge and change.
What excites you about the environment in CLAS?
I am so incredibly proud to be part of a public university that nurtures and celebrates writing throughout the liberal arts—and beyond.
What are your hobbies and pursuits outside of work?
I am a big soccer fan. I run. I grew up on salt water and for a long time I missed that landscape, but I’m learning the river’s personality, and I like taking a break and catching the river trail between classes and meetings, logging creature sightings—hummingbirds, fawns, catfish, eagle—all in just one morning.
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CLAS students explore art, history, and architecture in Greece
September 11, 2023
By: Emily Delgado
Over the summer, University of Iowa Department of Classics faculty member Debra Trusty led a group of 24 students across Athens as a continued learning experience of her spring semester class and study abroad course titled City of Athens: Bronze Age to Roman World.
“The main goal of this program was to expose students to the unique world of Athens, Greece, and help them experience first-hand how the city has handled both the difficulties and benefits of its long and rich past,” Trusty explains.
The study abroad group in front of the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion, Greece.
The class and the trip focused on the deep history, art, and archaeology of ancient Greece. Prior to the trip, Trusty worked to make sure her students were exposed to and well-informed through photographs, lectures, and scholarly materials that would help bring the ancient city to life for her students.
All of this prepared the students within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for an immersive experience in the culture, while also earning credit for majors in Ancient Civilization, Anthropology, and History.
“Our classroom is Athens, and I show them around, lecture at sites, and give them ample time to explore the city and its culture,” Trusty adds.
Lauren Aoki, a student who participated in the study abroad program, said the course provided valuable insights and information about ancient Athens.
“By immersing myself in the Greek culture, I was able to practice cultural relativism firsthand and keep an open mind,” said Aoki, who graduated in May with a degree in anthropology.
The group received a private tour from Assistant to the Director of the Agora excavations Irene Dimitriadou.
The trip gave Aoki and her fellow classmates a rare opportunity to actually experience what they learned firsthand, while also gaining the confidence to travel alone and explore new places.
“This exhilarating experience allowed me to broaden my knowledge about diverse cultures and ways of life and easily apply my academic knowledge in a practical setting. I confidently explored a foreign city, learned a few phrases of the language, and embraced new cultural practices,” Aoki said.
Trusty says she hoped her students, after weeks of extensive studying, felt at home and at ease in Athens. She says programs like this one are crucial for expanding learning experiences for students.
Throughout the trip, Trusty and her students were continuously greeted with screams of “Go, Hawks!”
“Our students and faculty, past and present, are everywhere,” Trusty says. “It makes our world seem a lot smaller when you realize how connected and impactful the University of Iowa is with the rest of the world.”
Study abroad group in front of the Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina in Greece.
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