Institute Co-Directors
Kenneth G. Brown (Ph.D., Michigan State University, 1999; B.S., University of Maryland, 1993) is Associate Professor of Management & Organizations and a Henry B. Tippie Research Fellow in the Tippie College of Business. Brown conducts research in the area of workplace learning and training. His research on the use of technology in learning environments garnered research awards from two different professional associations -- Society of Human Resource Management and the American Society of Training and Development. He currently serves as Associate Editor for the leading pedagogical journal in his discipline, the Academy of Management Learning & Education. Closer to home, Brown was a driving force in the development and implementation of the UI's Service Learning Institute, which serves as a workshop opportunity to assist faculty in designing service-learning strategies. In 2009, Brown was awarded the President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence. His most recent book Human Resource Management: Linking Strategy to Practicse (Wiley & Sons) was published in 2008.
Teresa Mangum (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990; M.A., North Carolina State University, 1979, B.S., Appalachian State University, 1976) is Associate Professor of English and International Studies. She has also served as Associate Dean of International Programs and Associate Director of the Obermann Center. She studies British Victorian literature and culture, particularly the ways that popular fiction helped Victorians to negotiate social change. Mangum is the author of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (University of Michigan Press, 1998) and a recent guest editor of the journals Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Philological Quarterly, and Victorian Periodicals Review. Her interest in social transformation prompted two current projects. The first asks how anxieties about aging find their way into literature and art; the second project turns to film as well as fictional human and animal relationships. In 2005, Mangum was awarded the President and Provost Award for Teaching Excellence, and in 2008 she received the Michael J. Brody Award for Faculty Excellence in Service to the University and the State of Iowa. At the Obermann Center, she co-directed a summer seminar, “Late Life: Representations, Perceptions, Possibilities” with Kathleen Buckwalter of Nursing. She and Jane Desmond, formerly of American Studies, co-directed an Interdisciplinary Research Semester, “Articulating the Animal.” She is organizing the Obermann Center Humanities Symposium, “Platforms for Public Scholars,” which will be held October 15-18, 2009. She has served on several community boards including the Domestic Violence Intervention Program, the Women's Resource and Action Center, and the Friends of the Animal Center.