A search committee charged by the Office of the Vice President for Research has selected two candidates for the next director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (OCAS). The interdisciplinary center is a hub for artists, scholars, and researchers who bridge campus with the larger world. 

Situated in on Church Street on the north end of campus, the OCAS provides offices for six Fellows-in-Residence each semester, as well as funding for a major annual humanities conference, small group collaborations, and faculty book completion workshops, along with many other programs. The Center is also a nexus for University-community activities, including lectures, workshops, and performances.

The two candidates will participate in public forums for the campus community: 

• Friday, February 23, 2:30-3:30 p.m., Iowa Theatre, 166 Iowa Memorial Union: Naomi Greyser, associate professor of American Studies, English and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies
• Wednesday, February 28, 2:30-3:30 p.m., Iowa Theatre, 166 Iowa Memorial Union: Luis Martín-Estudillo, professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Naomi Greyser

Greyser serves as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. In her research, teaching and service, Greyser engages the process of knowledge creation, with an eye towards making space for messiness and unpredictability. Her first book, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, was published with Oxford University press in 2017. Her articles appear in journals across the humanities, including American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, American Literature, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures in the US. Through her scholarship, Greyser brings the literary-rhetorical arts to bear on conversations in university studies, the geo-humanities, American studies, intersectional gender studies, and history of the senses. 

With the support of grants from the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute and the UI Provost Office, Greyser is currently completing the first of two interlinked book projects: Un/Blocked: Writing, Research, and the Creative Process and Blocked: Writing, Race and Gender at the University. She is a fellow with the Mellon Foundation’s HuMetrics Initiative. 

Luis Martín-Estudillo

Martín-Estudillo specializes in modern and contemporary Spanish cultural and intellectual history and criticism. He has also published broadly on early modern topics and visual culture. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Goya, Hispanic Review, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Ínsula, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Pasajes: Revista de Pensamiento Contemporáneo and Romance Quarterly. His recently authored and edited books include: Filosofía y tiempo final (2011), The Rise of Euroskepticism: Europe and Its Critics in Spanish Culture (2018) Despertarse de Europa. Arte, literatura, euroescepticismo (2019) and Goya and the Mystery of Reading, for which he won the 2023 Goldberg Prize.

He has received the Collegiate Teaching Award, the Dean's Scholar Award, the Collegiate Scholar Award, and three awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The successful candidate will succeed Teresa Mangum, professor in the Departments of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies and English, who has served as the director of OCAS since 2010.