Faculty

Sherif Abdelkarim
Assistant Professor
Sherif Abdelkarim specializes in English historical linguistics and Old English, Middle English, and classical and early postclassical Arabic literature. His work has appeared in New Literary History, Postmedieval, and PMLA, among other distinguished journals. He has also published book chapters for...
Arnold
Professor Emeritus
Arnold's research interests lie in number theory and algebraic geometry. He recently published the paper "Bounds of divided universal Bernoulli numbers and universal Kummer congruences," (with S. Wong and W. Ren) in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. Arnold is also active as a...
Applied Music Associate

Guitar

Leah
Assistant Professor
Leah Claire Allen is Assistant Professor in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and English at Grinnell College. Her current book project In Praise of Bad Critics revisits feminist critics from the 1960s and 1970s who have been labeled “bad critics” or “bad feminists” both within and...
Jonathan Andelson
Professor Senior Faculty

Rosenfeld Professor in Social Science

Jonathan Andelson was born in Chicago and earned a B.A. from Grinnell in 1970 and a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1974. His main interests are intentional communities, religion, agriculture, and human-environment interactions. His principal field research, on the Amana...
Claudia Anderson
Applied Music Associate Lecturer

Flute and Director of the Grinnell College Fresh Flutes Ensemble

Claudia Anderson is known for her originality and brilliance as a solo and chamber music performer across the U.S. She is a founding member of the innovative flute duo ZAWA! and of New Prairie Camerata, a chamber initiative based in Grinnell that showcased the community's historical and...
Profile Photo - Lynn Anderson
Assistant Professor

Head Women's Softball Coach; Assistant Volleyball Coach

Steve Andrews
Associate Professor

Director, Center for the Humanities

I teach mostly 18th and 19th century American Literature, but I like to roam a little, especially if given the opportunity to team teach or supervise MAPs. During any four-year cycle I am likely to offer a seminar on Whitman and Dickinson; an American poetry seminar titled “Beat, Black, and...
Jenny Anger
Professor
Jenny Anger is professor of art history at Grinnell College, where she has taught since earning her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture at Brown University in 1997. Anger’s specialty is twentieth-century European art history and theory. Her first book, Paul Klee and the Decorative in Modern...
Yvette Aparicio
Professor
At Grinnell, Yvette Aparicio is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies. She teaches contemporary Latin American literature and cultures, Latin American Studies and Spanish. Her course offerings include Introduction to Latin American Studies (taught in English) and Latin American Food &...
Todd Armstrong
Professor

Department chair of Russian, Central European, and Eurasian Studies

Timothy Arner
Associate Professor

Associate Dean of Curriculum and Academic Programs

Tim Arner specializes in medieval literature. His research and teaching interests include the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the influence of classical texts on Middle English poetry, and the intersections between fourteenth- and fifteenth-century literature and politics. He has published articles on...
David Arseneault
Senior Faculty
Now in his 23rd year at Grinnell College, Head Coach David Arseneault has become nationally and internationally renowned for his innovative coaching techniques and offensive-minded basketball. Known for full-court pressing and three-point shooting, his teams have led all playing levels in scoring...
David Arseneault Jr.
Assistant Professor

Head Women's Golf Coach; Head Men's Basketball Coach

J.M. Bacon
Assistant Professor
J. M. Bacon (Jules) is a Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Sociology Department. Their area of specialization is environmental sociology. During their time at Grinnell they have taught: Introduction to Environmental Sociology Sociology of Climate Change Indigenous Approaches to Sociology...
Mark Baechtel

Lecturer and Director of Forensic Activities & Club Sports

Mark Baechtel grew up in New Carlisle in Southwest Ohio. It’s a small town, not far from the border with Indiana. He earned his B.A. in Communications (Print Journalism) at American University in Washington D.C. His M.F.A. is from the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop, where he concentrated on...
Photograph of Susan Baley, Museum of Art director
Lecturer

Director, Museum of Art

George Barlow
Associate Professor
George Barlow is a poet who earned a B.A. in English from California State University, Hayward, an M.A. in American Studies and an M.F.A. in Poetry, both from the University of Iowa. He specializes in African-American literature, poetry, and teaches Craft of Poetry and the Poetry Seminar most...
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Assistant Professor
Shubhashrita Basu, Assistant Professor, received a B.Sc. in Economics from St. Xavier's College, Kolkata, India, a M.A. in Economics from Jadavpur University, India, and Ph.D. in Economics from Clemson University in May of 2021. Her teaching and research areas are health economics and labor...
Julia Bauder
Professor

Social Studies and Data Services Librarian

Director of DASIL

Julia Bauder’s research and teaching focuses on the intersection of data, technology, and information literacy. How can colleges make sure that all students, not just those majoring in statistics or data science, are data literate? What would it look like to take “data across the curriculum” or...
Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant image
Professor

Louise R. Noun Chair in Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant (known as “Dr. B” on campus) is a womanist sociologist. She came to Grinnell in fall 2019 and teaches the three core courses (Intro, Theory and Methods, and Senior Seminar) as well as the electives Growing up Girl, Feminist Educations, and Beyond the Little Mermaid: Race...
Cortney Benjamin
Assistant Professor
Cortney Benjamin received her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 2016. Her research explores baroque spectacle and identity construction in women’s travel narratives from the early modern Hispanic world. She is passionate about sharing her own travel experiences and encouraging students to travel...
Valerie Benoist
Professor
Valérie Benoist is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies specializing in colonial literature. She teaches for the Spanish Department as well as for the Latin American Studies Concentration. Her course offerings include Introduction to Latin American Studies (in English) as well as...
Vicki Bentley-Condit
Professor Senior Faculty
Vicki Bentley-Condit has taught biological anthropology at Grinnell since 1995. She is a primatologist who has conducted research with both wild and captive baboon populations and captive rhesus macaques. Her primary research interests are mother-infant relationships and infant development. However...
Jeffrey
Professor

Director, Donald and Winifred Wilson Center for Innovation & Leadership

Jeff is an applied harmonic analyst studying composite dilation wavelets and compressed sensing. With applications to digital signal processing, these fields explore the mathematics of efficient representation and acquisition of signals. This has led to excursions in probability, high dimensional...
Renee Bourgeois Parsons
Lecturer

Director of the Mathematics Laboratory

Renee is a 1996 graduate of Grinnell College with a major in mathematics. She started her career in mathematics education while a student at Grinnell by working as a grader, Math Lab tutor, Real Problems tutor, and student secretary for the (then) Mathematics/Computer Science department. Since...
Leif Brottem
Associate Professor
I teach courses in Global Development Studies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). My research focuses on the intersection of human security, conflict, and development in West and Central Africa. Current activities engage with local dynamics in conflict-affected communities in Mali, Benin, Chad...
Picture of Prof. Keith Brouhle
Associate Professor
On leave spring 2024. Keith Brouhle, Associate Professor, has a B.A. from Grinnell College, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His course offerings include microeconomic analysis, public economics, and environmental and resource economics. His research examines...
Brown
Professor Emeritus
Professor Brown has been a member of the Grinnell History Department since the fall of 1989. She has chaired the History Department and the Gender and Women's Studies concentration, been an active participant in the Center for Prairie Studies, and served as chair of the Social Studies Division...
Jennifer Brown
Associate Professor

Director of Collegium Musicum

Jennifer Williams Brown (musicology) is a specialist in the history and performance of Baroque music, particularly 17th-century Italian opera. Her research focuses on decoding clues in 17th-century manuscript and printed sources, then making the results accessible to modern performers, students, and...
Fred Buck
Applied Music Associate

Banjo

Fred Buck is currently a AMA of Music at Grinnell College, where he currently teaches banjo, resphonic guitar (Dobro) and mandolin. He played piano and accordion in his youth and became interested in old time and bluegrass music and has become proficient in most of the old time time instruments...
Sarah Burnell
Assistant Professor
Sarah Burnell '14, is an assistant professor of physical education, the head coach of the men's and women's cross country teams, and an assistant coach for the men's and women't track and field teams (working with distance and middle distance runners). Prior to her role as a professor and head coach...
Kristen Burson
Associate Professor
Kristen Burson is an experimental condensed matter physicist. Her research group focuses on studies of nanoscale electronics and the atomic structure of silica using surface science techniques. Burson earned her bachelor’s degree from Gustavus Adolphus College and her Ph.D. in physics from the...
Byron
Hello! Nice to meet you! I am Byron, 梅論, 梅拜倫 or 바이런, as you prefer. I like learning new languages and cultures, and I am more than happy to chat in English, Spanish or Japanese, so if you see me around, please don't hesitate to say hello!
Robert Cadmus
Professor Emeritus
Current research involves the study of the behavior of red giant stars using the telescope at Grinnell’s observatory. Selected Research Students & Projects: Nicholas Hill '09, "Observations of the Crab Pulsar Light Curve at Optical Wavelengths" Rosie Malsberger '09, "Galactic Spectroscopy: The...
David
Professor

Henry R. Luce Professor of Nations and the Global Environment

Tropical Ecology My research is in the ecology and species composition of tropical and subtropical forests in both the Paleotropics and Neotropics. In the Brazilian Amazon, I have eight permanent study sites - embracing a total of over 22,000 trees which are regularly monitored - from the foothills...
Yoel Castillo Botello
Assistant Professor
Yoel Castillo Botello holds a PhD in Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University. His scholarly interests include medieval and early modern performance, book studies, and the digital humanities. His current research projects focus on the material cultures and reading networks...
Libby Cave
Assistant Professor

Digital Humanities and Instruction Librarian

Areas of Responsibility Reference and Instruction Consulting Areas Classics; East Asian Studies; French & Arabic; Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies; German Studies; Peace and Conflict Studies; Russian; Russian, Central European, and Eurasian Studies; Studies in Africa, Middle East, and South...
Jee-Weon Cha
Associate Professor
Jee-Weon Cha is a music theorist with interests in analysis and interpretation of 19th- and 20th-century music, music perception and cognition, music aesthetics and semiotics, and the history of music theory. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D. in Music History and Theory)...
Marc Chamberland
Professor

Myra Steele Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

Marc Chamberland enjoys teaching a diverse set of courses in the mathematics curriculum. With the support of an NSF grant, he has developed materials to emphasize computer discovery. Marc has published over fifty papers in refereed journals (with twenty co-authors) and regularly speaks at...
Applied Music Associate

Bass

Senior Faculty
Chasson entered senior faculty status in the summer of 2012 after teaching at Grinnell since 1980. His research focusses on the functions of decoration and illustration in medieval Latin manuscripts made for use in monasteries and cathedrals, especially in Italy and France from the 11th through the...
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Instructor
Xiao Chen (He/Him) joins the History Department of Grinnell College as a faculty member in Fall 2023. His dissertation, “Punishment, Frontier, and Ethnicity in the Making of the Qing Empire (1636-1912)”, have charted the rise of a new convict labor regime engaged in categorizing, exploiting, and...
Jeremy Chen
Assistant Professor
Jeremy Chen is an artist and educator with an MFA in Printmaking (Sculpture minor) from The University of Iowa (2006), Center for the Book Arts Certificate (2006) and a BA in Art including K-12 teacher certification (1994). His cultural production includes work in three areas: individual practice...
Dixuan Yujing Chen
Assistant Professor
Dixuan Yujing Chen (religious name: Dixuan Shi), Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions at Grinnell College, is an ordained Buddhist nun of the Mahayana tradition. She received her Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies and East Asian Religions from the University of Florida. Her research explores a range...
Catherine
Assistant Professor
Catherine Chou is a historian of early modern European political theory and culture. At heart, her work is concerned with dueling visions of the 'common wealth' and ideal society, and the ways in which men and women living in an age of religious conflict and dynastic uncertainty tried to make these...
Mark Christel
Associate Professor

Librarian of the College

Areas of responsibility Library Administration; Collection Development; Library Planning. Consulting Areas Physical Education
Charlotte Christensen
Associate Professor
Prof. Charlotte Christensen is an associate professor of physics at Grinnell College. Her research is focused on understanding the process of galaxy formation through the use of detailed computer simulations. In 2018, she received the National Science Foundation CAREER Grant, which supports her...
Sharon R. Clayton
Associate Professor

Acquisitions and Discovery Librarian

Areas of Responsibility Library Acquisitions and Discovery; Cataloging and Metadata; Research and Instruction Consulting Areas Art and Art History, French and Arabic
Rob Clower
Applied Music Associate

Bagpipe

Rob Clower has been teaching Highland bagpipes for more than 40 years. His students play in pipe bands throughout that U.S. and abroad, many also competing successfully as soloists. In 2007, Rob founded Turlach Ur, now the largest band in Iowa. Under his direction, Turlach Ur enjoyed a highly...
Instructor

Head Men's and Women's Golf Coach

Edward
Professor
Edward Cohn is a scholar of Soviet and Eastern European history, with a specialty in the history of policing, surveillance, and the often-blurry line between public and private life in the Communist world. A 1999 graduate of Swarthmore College, he worked for a year as a political journalist and came...
Christopher Conway
Associate Professor
I study the neurocognitive mechanisms of learning and memory, specifically a form of implicit learning referred to as “statistical learning”, and how such mechanisms are used in the service of language development across diverse experiences. My work relies on a combination of cognitive and cognitive...
Associate Professor
Professor Cooper is interested in the evolution and ecology of phenotypic variation, particularly the selection pressures that lead to variation between sexes and between species. To study this, she investigates color and behavior of species in two damselfly genera, Megalagrion (an endemic Hawaiian...
Danya Crites
Lecturer
Danya Crites has taught as a visiting professor at several institutions including Grinnell College since she received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Iowa in 2010. Her dissertation, “From Mosque to Cathedral: The Social and Political Significations of Mudejar Architecture in Late...
Monessa
Associate Professor
Monessa Cummins received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on Greek epinician poetry, a type of lyric poetry composed in praise of victors at ancient athletic games. In particular she studies this poetry within its historical and archaeological context. In...
Cunningham
Professor
Selected Research Students & Projects Greg Dyer ’04, “Magnetic phase diagrams of RCo2Ge2 single crystals.” Xu Wang ’04, “Effect of site dilution on magnetic transitions in (DyxY(1-x))Co2Ge2.” Heather Thiessen ”02, “Magnetic anisotropy in the RCo2Ge2 Series.”
Charlie
Associate Professor
Office Hours My office hours during the Fall 2022 semester are: Monday: 1:30–2:30pm Tuesday: 1:30–3:00pm Wednesday: 3:15–4:45pm Friday: 8:45–9:45am (by appointment only) I am happy to take walk-ins during my office hours, but you can also reserve at time at calendly.com/curtsinger.
Lesley Delmenico
Associate Professor
Lesley Delmenico is an associate professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at Grinnell College, Grinnell Iowa. After a decade spent living outside the US, where she experienced decolonization and became interested in postcolonial performance, she was an actor in Chicago before earning her M.A...
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Instructor
Growing up in China, traveling extensively across Southeast Asia, while pursuing her academic career in the US, Beiyin Deng considers herself a boundary-crosser who aims to bridge these different worlds through her research. Her dissertation investigates contemporary Buddhist craftsmanship in the...
ben
Associate Professor
Plant Molecular Biology My research focuses on the response of plants to environmental stress at the molecular, biochemical, and physiological levels, utilizing both crop and model plant species. Most of my research centers on non-biological stresses such as exposure to foreign compounds, or...
Dustin
Assistant Professor
Dustin Dixon teaches courses on the literature and culture of ancient Greece as well as Greek and Latin courses from the elementary to the advanced levels. He regularly teaches first-year Greek, and his past courses have focused on ancient drama; Athenian political culture; classical mythology...
Elizabeth
Professor
Elizabeth Dobbs regularly taught courses on rhetoric and historical linguistics, and seminars on Chaucer and other English and European medieval writers. She co-taught a MAP Seminar, “Conceptions of Space and Place in Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-1650,” and has directed MAPs for the Linguistics...
Timothy Dobe
Professor
Professor Dobe teaches courses on Hinduism, Bollywood and religion, Gandhi, Global Christianity and Sufism. His research focuses on comparing religions, traditions of sainthood and asceticism, and the history of western imperialism, religious pluralism and modernization. His book about Hindu and...
picture of Gina Donovan

Senior Instructional Technologist

Gina Donovan joined Grinnell College after years of working in technology and education. Her MA in professional communication from Iowa State University got her interested in how communication impacts understanding and furthers ideas. Her work in instructional design for various businesses expanded...
Barry Driscoll
Associate Professor
I'm originally from Galway, Ireland and made it to Grinnell by way of Leiden (Holland), Copenhagen, Washington, London, Oslo, and finally Wisconsin, either working in international development or researching themes in comparative politics. My work is on the political economy of development and the...
Charlie Duke
Professor Emeritus
Current Research Interests The study of high-energy gamma-rays incident on the earth's atmosphere from astrophysical sources through the Veritas Collaboration consumes most of my time. The Veritas Collaboration built and manages the four-telescope array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes...
Assistant Professor
Tetyana Dzyadevych is a researcher, commentator, and analyst of contemporary Ukrainian and Russian culture and literature. She is coming to teach at Grinnell College after a year of research at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, where she is currently working on...
Vince
Professor

Waldo S. Walker Chair in Biology

My students and I try to determine: (1) how natural selection shapes plant reproduction, life history, and physiology; and (2) why plant species occur where they do, rather than somewhere else. A westerner transplanted to Iowa, I seem to be reasonably well adapted to this novel habitat. I attended...
Caleb head shot—smiling
Professor

Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

I am a Professor of History and Religious Studies at Grinnell College, where I am also Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I graduated from Vassar College with a degree in political science, an education that still informs my work and my life. I have a...
Fernanda Eliott
Assistant Professor
Fernanda Eliott is an assistant professor of computer science at Grinnell College. Professor Eliott builds Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems that use cognitive inspiration and Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques. Her overall goal is to develop state-of-the-art cognitively inspired...
Ann Ellis
Professor
I spend my research time exploring the development of children’s cognitive processes. My work is motivated by the goal to understand how children’s developing abilities and their experiences in the world interact with their developing cognitive processes. I teach classes on psychology and child...
Applied Music Associate

Organ

Kevin Engel
Associate Professor

Science Librarian

Areas of Responsibility Kistle Science Library, Reference and Instruction, Collection Development Consulting Areas Biological Chemistry, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Environmental Studies, Linguistics, Mathematics and Statistics, Neuroscience, Physics, and Psychology.
Applied Music Associate

Harp

Karla Erickson
Professor
Karla is a feminist ethnographer of labor. She studies interaction and community in market exchanges. In her first book, The Hungry Cowboy she studied Cheers-like community building in a Tex-Mex restaurant as a way of thinking about how connection was offered and sometimes found in the marketplace...
Xavier Escandell
Associate Professor
Xavier Escandell's research explores immigration, transnationalism, and race/ethnic relations in the context of Western and Eastern Europe and Latin America. His published work appears in journals such as Annual Review of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social...
Gabriel Espinosa
Lecturer

Applied Music Associate: Jazz Voice and Director of Latin American Jazz Ensemble

Gabriel Espinosa was born in Merida, Mexico. His love of music began at a very young age. With the help of his mother he began playing the guitar at the age of six. By the age of fourteen, along with his brothers Victor and Patricio, Gabriel performed with their group “Los Deltons”, where he played...
Farrar has a relaxed expression and sports a beard, glasses, and dark green beanie.
Assistant Professor
S. Benjamin Farrar has designed lighting, scenery, and projections in venues that include The Joyce Theatre, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, and The Public Theater in NYC, The Majestic in Boston, The McCarter in Princeton, Wolf Trap in Virginia, and Z-Space in San Francisco. He has also designed for...
Jin
Professor

Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature

Jin Feng is Professor of Chinese and Japanese, and Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College. She teaches all levels of Chinese language courses and on Chinese literature and culture. Specific classes include “Chinese Women: Past and Present,” “Modern China through...
John Fennell
Professor

F. Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy

William Ferguson
Senior Faculty

Gertrude B. Austin Professor of Economics

Bill Ferguson is the Gertrude B. Austin Professor of Economics at Grinnell College, where he has taught since 1989. He is the author of The Political Economy of Collective Action, Inequality, and Development (Stanford University Press, 2020) and Collective Action and Exchange: A Game-Theoretic...
Susan Ferguson
Professor

Director of Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

Susan Ferguson (she/her) is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Grinnell College, where she has taught for over 30 years. Ferguson regularly teaches Introduction to Sociology, and her critically acclaimed anthology, Mapping the Social Landscape...
Applied Music Associate Lecturer

Violin

Assistant Professor
Sara Francisco received her PhD in Sociology and Social Data Analytics from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching interests include studying the intersections between gender and race/ethnicity, health disparities, and quantitative methods. Her research often uses a myriad of...
Evelyn Freeman
Assistant Professor

Head Women's Cross Country and Track/Field Coach

Evelyn Freeman has been a member of the Grinnell College coaching staff since 1980. She is the head women's cross country coach, as well as the head women's indoor and outdoor track coach. Over the past 29 years, Evelyn has produced 13 Midwest Conference cross country championship teams, two indoor...
Freeman, Will
Associate Professor

Head Men's Cross Country and Track/Field Coach

After a highly successful 42 years of coaching and teaching sport psychology and sport sociology at Grinnell College, Will Freeman has retired from coaching to teach exclusively in the American studies department at Grinnell. His innovative and successful athlete-centered model of coaching is now...
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Professor
Christopher's research involves the study of association schemes, along with a new kind of mathematical object called a hypergroup. Association schemes are combinatorial structures which originally arose in statistics, but have since yielded applications to a wide variety of other fields, including...
Brigittine French
Professor

Assistant Vice President of Global Education

Brigittine French joined the Grinnell faculty in 2003 and is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. French is a linguistic and political anthropologist whose diverse body of teaching and research focuses on theoretical and ethnographic approaches to narrative...
Eugene Gaub
Professor Senior Faculty
Pianist Eugene Gaub is Professor of Music at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses in music theory as well as piano. He has recently given lecture-recitals for the International Festival of Spanish Keyboard Music, held in Mojácar, Spain, and at the Université Laval in Québec City, with another...
Andrew Gentzsch
Applied Music Associate

Violin

Andrew Gentzsch, a native of Iowa City, is the violin instructor at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa and Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. Mr. Gentzsch has led the University of Delaware Chamber Orchestra and the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra. Previously, Mr. Gentzsch received music...
Katya Gibel Mevorach
Professor Senior Faculty
Katya Gibel Mevorach holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in African Studies from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Gibel Mevorach is a Professor in Anthropology and American Studies at Grinnell College. Baccalaureate 2017: Professor...
Gibson
Professor Emerita
A s a cognitive psychologist, Professor Gibson’s research focused on executive functions (flexibility, updating, and managing resources) and on implicit memory (the influence of past experience in the absence of conscious recollection) with a focus on aging and problem solving. In recent years...
Ed Gilday
Associate Professor Emeritus
We are deeply saddened to share the news of Professor Ed Gilday’s passing on May 17, 2022. An obituary and tribute wall, where condolences may be shared are available online through the Smith Funeral Home site. Associate Professor of Religious Studies, has a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin...
Eleanor Glewwe
Visiting Assistant Professor
Eleanor Glewwe earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCLA in 2019. Her research interests lie in phonology and phonetics. She uses artificial grammar learning experiments to test whether people are biased toward learning phonetically natural phonological patterns. She has also studied the tonal...
Bradley
Associate Professor
On leave 2023–24 academic year. Bradley Graham (Ph.D. University of Colorado, 2008) – Bradley Graham, Associate Professor, has B.S.E and J.D. degrees from the University of Iowa, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His course offerings include the economics of...
Greene Raquel
Associate Professor
Raquel joined the department in 1998 as a CSMP scholar and dissertation fellow. Raquel teaches all levels of the Russian language curriculum, and also teaches a course based on her research, "The Theme of the African in Russian Literature and Culture." Her research takes her to Moscow on a regular...
Leslie Gregg-Jolly
Professor Senior Faculty

Douglas Johnson ’77 Professor of Biology

2019 Distinguished Faculty Member Award, Iowa Chapter of the AAUW for work for educational equity for women and underrepresented groups in higher education
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Professor Emeritus
While his initial research agenda was on mass attitudes and behavior in Africa, over the last decade his research has focused on comparable phenomena in Russia. In particular, he is concerned with mass support (or lack thereof) for Russian democratization, and with Russian nationalism. He has...
Marlys Grimm
Lecturer
Marlys Grimm attended Sheldon High School and Central College, where she studied piano with Donald Gren. She has collaborated at Dordt, Northwestern, Grinnell and Central colleges in student and faculty recitals. Grimm has accompanied high school, college, community and professional singers...
Jan Gross
Professor Emerita
Jan Gross is Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages, emerita. She earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages at the University of Michigan and an M.A. from Ohio State. Her teaching and research focus on how theatre and dialogue enable us to “imagine the other.” Her work on Algerian-born...
Michael Guenther
Associate Professor

Department chair of Science, Medicine, and Society

Mike Guenther began teaching at Grinnell College in 2007, having received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, and his M.A. & Ph.D from Northwestern University. A historian of science, technology and the environment, he is currently finishing a book project (tentatively entitled, Science and...
Ross Haenfler
Professor
Ross Haenfler is Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College where he teaches Social Movements, Deviance and Social Control, Sociological Theory, Men and Masculinities, and introductory sociology courses. He loves teaching and tries to teach classes that create possibilities for students to live more...
Professor

Heath Visiting Professor in Anthropology

Cynthia Hansen
Associate Professor

Associate Dean of the College

On leave 2023–24 academic year. Cynthia Hansen began teaching in the Linguistics Concentration at Grinnell in January 2012. Her research focuses on the documentation and linguistic description of Iquito, a highly endangered language of the Peruvian Amazon. She teaches the core courses within the...
Peter Hanson
Associate Professor
Peter Hanson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and a specialist in American politics. He teaches courses on constitutional law and American political institutions. His research explores the politics of the United States Congress. His book Too Weak to Govern: Majority Party Power in the...
David
Professor
Professor David Harrison received a B.A. in French from Swarthmore College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the literature and culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France. He is the principal translator and co-editor...
Assistant Professor

Head Women's Basketball Coach; Assistant Women's Softball Coach

Hazel_pic
Assistant Professor
Christy’s research is in a field of mathematics known as algebraic topology. Roughly speaking, algebraic topology studies the different ways we can assign meaningful algebraic data to geometric objects. This allows us to then use algebraic tools to answer geometric questions that were otherwise...
Pratima drinking coffee
Assistant Professor
Pratima is a mathematician working in the fields of Probability, Partial Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems. She mainly works on problems arising from stochastic processes that are used to model various real-world phenomena. She studies the long-time behavior of these random processes by...
Assistant Professor

Head Swimming and Diving Coach

Hedman graduated from Denison University with a bachelor’s degree in Health, Exercise and Sports Studies with a minor in Psychology. He swam for the powerful Denison program and was named a Scholar All-American and member of the Dean’s List. During his time at Denison, he also was a 9-time All...
Astrid
Professor
Astrid Henry teaches a wide variety of courses in Grinnell’s Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) Program, including Introduction to GWSS (GWS 111), Theory and Methodology in GWSS (GWS 249), and the Senior Seminar in GWSS (GWS 495), as well as Foundations of LGBTQ Studies (GWS 211) and...
Headshot of Alan Henson playing cello
Applied Music Associate

Cello

Alan Henson is the cello instructor at Grinnell College and has an active private studio in Ames. He is Principal Cellist of the Central Iowa Symphony, and plays double bass for touring Broadway shows at Des Moines Civic Center. He is former Principal Bassist of the Des Moines, Dubuque, and Waterloo...
Carolyn smiling
Associate Professor
Carolyn Herbst Lewis is Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and History. She joined the faculty at Grinnell College in 2013. Professor Lewis is a specialist in the fields of American women’s history and the histories of sex, sexuality, and medicine in the United States...
Eugene Herman
Professor Emeritus
Gene's greatest interest for many years has been the use of computing in teaching and learning mathematics. The most significant result of his efforts in this area is the textbook which he coauthored with Michael Pepe and which was published by John Wiley & Sons, Visual Linear Algebra. In recent...
Heriberto Hernandez
Professor
Heriberto Hern á ndez is a community-engaged chemistry professor with many years of experience administering education, conducting research projects with undergraduate students, and serving the chemistry community. As a professor at Grinnell College, Heriberto has worked with over 50 students, has...
Kelly Herold
Professor
Kelly Herold has spent several summers, a spring and two winters in Russia. Her research on memoir and travel writing has taken her to Dublin, London and Prague. She has written commentary to Sumarokov's Ody torzhestvennye (included in a facsimile edition, a project directed by Ronald Vroon and E.P...
paulwithcats
Assistant Professor
Paul's research is in the realm of pure mathematics, at the intersection of operator algebras and dynamical systems. Given a dynamical system, one can encode the information of the system inside of a C*-algebra and use this duality to study both the dynamical systems and their associated operator...
Darrius Hills
Associate Professor
Darrius D. Hills is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College. He received his M.Div. from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, and his M.A. and Ph.D in Religion (concentration in African American Religion) from Rice University. His research interests privilege African...
Shannon
Professor
Shannon Hinsa-Leasure is a microbiologist and a professor of biology at Grinnell College in Iowa. Her research interests include microbial diversity, antibiotic resistance and genetic exchange, and strategies for bacterial survival. Most recently she began a collaboration with Dr. Lillian...
Putu Hiranmayena
Assistant Professor
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as Assistant Professor of Music (Performance and Creativity), where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on Heavy Metal Music, Electronic Music, and Noise and Activism. He also is a founding member of Balinese...
Tim Hollibaugh
Associate Professor

Head Baseball and Assistant Football Coach

Andrew
Professor Emeritus
Before joining the Grinnell faculty in 1978, Andrew Hsieh received his education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Kyoto University (Japan), and Yale University. He has currently entered Senior Faculty Status. He taught Chinese and Japanese history classes at the college, and also held...
Christopher Hunter
Professor Senior Faculty
My academic interests currently focus on the organizational analysis of nonprofit organizations. In the past, I have served as Grinnell College's coordinator of the American Sociological Association's Minority Opportunities through School Transformation Program, as a member of the college's...
Kathleen Hurley
Lecturer
Kathleen Hurley is the instructor/lecturer for THD 104 and THD 204, the dance technique classes for the Grinnell College Department of Theatre and Dance. She is also the founder and Artistic Director of Hurley & Dancers, a professional modern dance company based in Des Moines, Iowa. Hurley also was...
Erin Hurley
Associate Professor

Head Men's & Women's Swimming Coach

In 2011, Erin Hurley begins her 17th season as Grinnell College's head swimming and diving coach. As a faculty member she teaches swimming, triathlon, and Lifeguard Instruction courses. A 1989 graduate of the University of Nebraska, Hurley had a successful career as a Cornhusker swimmer. Competing...
Paul Hutchison
Associate Professor
Paul Hutchison, Associate Professor of Education, is Grinnell’s science and math education specialist. His courses include Educational Principles in a Pluralistic Society, The Politics of Educational Assessment, Educational Psychology, the teaching methods courses for math and science, and How to...
Susan
Professor Senior Faculty
Susan Ireland is Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature. She grew up in England, and taught in France for eight years before coming to the United States in 1982. She has a B.A. in French and Latin from the University of Bristol (England), a "maîtrise" in Applied Linguistics from...
Peter
Professor
I am an ecosystem ecologist teaching at Grinnell College, a four-year liberal arts undergraduate institution in Iowa. All faculty in the Biology Department teach the introductory course (Introduction to Biological Inquiry) on subject matter of our choice, as the goal of the course is to expose...
Kathryn Jacobson
Professor
I am a fungal biologist and I teach in the Biology Department at Grinnell College. Faculty members teach BIO 150 - Introduction to Biological Inquiry on subject matter of our choosing, because our course goals are to expose students to learning by doing experimental science. My BIO 150 section is...
Cori
Associate Professor

Director, Center for Prairie Studies

Cori guides students and pre-service teachers in studying and teaching English as a Second Language. Her research focuses on critical issues in English language education. In particular, Cori is interested in English language voluntourism, or short-term, volunteer English language teaching in the...
Dr. Lara Janson
Assistant Professor
Lara Janson (’05) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College. A sociologist specializing in gender, sexuality, law, and qualitative/mixed research methods, she is interested in researching and teaching about intersections of inequality. Dr. Janson enjoys implementing...
Brian Jaworski
Associate Professor

Head Men's Golf and Head Men's Soccer Coach

Head Coach Brian Jaworski took over as leader of the Pioneer men's soccer program in 2004 and has built Grinnell into a powerhouse. The 2009 Pioneer squad won the Midwest Conference Tournament title and earned the school’s first-ever NCAA Tournament appearance as Jaworski was voted MWC Coach of the...
Charles Jepsen
Professor Emeritus
When Chuck moved from Senior Faculty Status to Professor Emeritus, he gave up his last teaching related duty: conducting summer research with Grinnell students. This was an activity he began in 1992, and in the following years he worked with a total of 39 students. Chuck investigates problems in...
headshot of Priscilla Jimenez Pazmino
Assistant Professor
Priscilla Jimenez-Pazmino is an Assistant Professor at Grinnell College. She received her bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Guayaquil-Ecuador. She also holds a M.Sc. and Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Illinois -Chicago...
Lakesia Johnson
Associate Professor
Lakesia D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, & Sexuality Studies and English at Grinnell College. Johnson received a bachelor’s from Smith College. She earned her J.D., M.A., and Ph.D. in Women Studies from the Ohio State University. Her areas of teaching and research include Black...
Picture of Professor Jones wearing an green shirt
Associate Professor
Stephanie P. Jones, Ph.D. is an associate Professor of Education at Grinnell College, where she teaches courses in Youth Culture, Young Adult Literature and Introduction to Educational Studies. Her two research strands examine Black women’s literacy practices and the exploration of racialized trauma...
Christopher Jones
Associate Professor

Special Collections Librarian and Archivist of the College

Consulting Areas European Studies, History, and Prairie Studies
Barry Jones
Lecturer

Director of the Young, Gifted, and Black Gospel Choir

Barry Jones has been the full-time director for the Young, Gifted, and Black (YGB) Gospel Choir since the fall of 2006. He served the roles of guest director and interim director during the three years prior to his full-time appointment. Barry is also known in the Des Moines, Iowa, community and...
Phillip Jones
Associate Professor

Humanities Librarian and Coordinator of Research Services

Areas of Responsibility Coordinates reference and instruction services Consulting Areas English, Philosophy; Religious Studies; Spanish. Concentrations: American Studies and Latin American Studies
Jeff Jonkman
Associate Professor
Jeff came to Grinnell in 2009, and was previously a faculty member at Mississippi State University and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where he taught a variety of statistics courses. Jeff's primary research is in the area of meta-analysis, which deals with appropriate statistical...
HJJ
Applied Music Associate

Collaborative Pianist

Dr. Hyejin Joo won the gold medal at the Seattle International Piano Competition and top awards from the Wideman, Chautauqua, Indiana University Concerto Competition, Seoul National University Concerto Competition, and the Kumho Art Foundation Audition. She is a member of the Civic Orchestra of...
Assistant Professor Political Science and Policy Studies
Assistant Professor
Andreas Jozwiak began teaching at Grinnell College in 2022, having completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the European University Institute, a M.A. and Ph.D from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. from Trinity University. Trained as a comparative political scientist, his...
Daniel
Professor Emeritus
Kaiser has taught at Grinnell since 1979, and in 2008, entered senior faculty status. A specialist in medieval and early modern Russia, Mr. Kaiser has studied legal, social, and demographic history. He is the author of The Growth of the Law in Medieval Russia (Princeton University Press, 1980), and...
Kathryn Kamp
Professor Senior Faculty

Earl D. Strong Professor in Social Studies

Kathryn Kamp teaches anthropology and archaeology at Grinnell College. While she has worked in Syria and Belize, her major research focus is the study of the Puebloan populations who once resided near modern Flagstaff, Arizona where she has been excavating and doing survey for over twenty years. She...
Maisha
Assistant Professor
Professor Kamunde-Devonish studies inorganic chemistry. Her research is focused on the synthetic design of metal complexes that can serve as models for metalloenzymes, and studying the structure-function relationships of these complexes to better understand how they activate small molecules in...
Kapila
Professor
I teach postcolonial literature from Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia. I have also taught the Victorian novel with an emphasis on colonialism and gender. Once in three years, I have been able to teach a course on transnational feminism moving...
Harold Kasimow
Professor Emeritus

George A. Drake Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus

Articles on Kasimow and his Works Judaism Open to the Religions of the Nations: A Polish Catholic Theologian reads an American Jewish Pluralist A review of Professor Harold Kasimow's The Search Will Make You Free: A Jewish Dialogue with World Religions To Be a Mensch Professor Harold Kasimow's...
Andrw Kaufman eyes fixed concentrating on art creation
Professor
Andrew Kaufman received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the University of South Florida in a studio art program that emphasized concept. Kaufman considers himself a convergent artist, letting idea dictate medium, which has led to a multiplicity of mediums that include video, sound...
Andrea Kelly photo
Assistant Professor
On leave 2023–24 academic year. Andrea Kelly, Assistant Professor, received her B.S. in Economics from the University of South Dakota and her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. Her teaching and research areas are health economics and public economics. Much of her research focuses on the impacts of...
A woman with brown hair in a ponytail. She is wearing a black top.
Assistant Professor
My research is on abstract math, specifically commutative algebra. I am particularly interested in local cohomology modules; these objects are defined in a very abstract way, and yet can be understood with friendly, concrete calculations. In some number systems, there are ways to factor numbers...
Assistant Professor
I study contemporary multi-ethnic American women’s literature. Specifically, I am interested in this literature’s pedagogical exploration of how to encourage ethical living. My dissertation examines how the magical realist novels of four contemporary African American and Asian American women promote...
Kluber
Professor
Matthew Kluber teaches print media, digital media, drawing and hybrid media. Kluber holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa and a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught at the University of Iowa and at Iowa State University and was...
Cecilia Knight
Associate Professor

Librarian (Senior Faculty Status)

Cecilia Knight is an Associate Professor in the Libraries at Grinnell College. She is very involved in digital scholarship efforts at Grinnell College including the institutional repository, Digital Grinnell, and many digital projects on campus as a librarian with a specialization in organization...
Assistant Professor

Head Women's Soccer Coach; Assistant Women's Basketball Coach

Assistant Professor
Owen Kohl’s research explores connections between media-making and different social imaginations of home. Among other questions, he asks how belonging and communication technologies intersect with violently constructed national homelands—both in the contemporary US and after socialist Yugoslavia’s...
Shonda Kuiper
Professor
Professor Kuiper’s courses at Grinnell emphasize the application of statistics to multiple disciplines, a topic she also emphasizes in her research. Prior to teaching, she worked as a senior engineer and consulting statistician for Hallmark Greeting Cards. She also serves as a statistical consultant...
Tess Kulstad
Assistant Professor
Tess M. Kulstad Gonzalez is a sociocultural anthropologist with a longstanding interest in the social construction of relatedness, childrearing, and the human rights of children. Her research explores the ways in which local and global sociocultural, economic, political processes affect family...
Paul
Associate Professor
Assistant Professor Albert Lacson teaches courses that focus on race and ethnicity in US history, including Native American and African American history, race in early America, comparative slavery, and European-Indian relations in colonial North America. In his research, he seeks to illuminate the...
Pascal Lafontant
Professor
The Lafontant lab studies heart repair and regeneration in zebrafish and the giant danio with undergraduate students. In humans and adult mammals, cardiac injuries (heart attacks) result in permanent scarring of the heart muscle. This response to injury may lead to subsequent heart failure. However...
Gerald Lalonde
Professor Emeritus
Gerald V. Lalonde is Professor Emeritus of Classics. He has been a long-time member of the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and a frequent research fellow at the School. His published scholarship has been chiefly in the fields of Greek epigraphy and Athenian...
Jonathan Larson image
Assistant Professor
Jonathan Larson , Assistant Professor of Education, is a linguistic and political anthropologist of education with teaching, scholarly, and administrative expertise in issues concerning secondary education and democracy; political discourse, language socialization and literacy; multilingualism; and...
A Black woman with glasses wears a red headwrap, pink sweater and pink chunky necklace looks straight at the camera. She stands in front of a bookshelf.
Assistant Professor
Makeba Lavan is an assistant professor in English at Grinnell College. Generally speaking, her research focuses on (African) American Studies, Afrofuturism/Speculative Fiction and Popular Culture. In the fall of 2018, Makeba was granted a fellowship in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality department at...
Mark Laver
Associate Professor

Director of Jazz Ensemble

Saxophonist and ethnomusicologist Mark Laver is an Associate Professor of Music at Grinnell College, where he directs the jazz band and teaches classes on jazz and popular music. As a performer, Professor Laver has shared the stage with such leading jazz and improvising artists as Lee Konitz...
Logan
Associate Professor
Logan Lee, Assistant Professor, received a B.A in Economics and Government from Augustana University and an M.S. and Ph.D in Economics from the University of Oregon. Professor Lee teaches courses in behavioral and experiment economics, the economics of crime, and econometrics. Much of his research...
Erick
Associate Professor
Professor Leggans primary responsibilities are teaching the introductory course and laboratories for the Organic Chemistry (CHM 221-222) and General Chemistry (CHM 129). His research focus is in the semi and total synthesis of biologically active natural products and the development of new synthetic...
Mark Levandoski
Professor
We study the molecular pharmacology of neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs). These ligand-gated ion channels are the seat of nicotine addiction and are implicated in a wide range of other neurological abnormalities such as Parkinson’s disease and attention disorders. Most recently, we...
Clark Lindgren
Professor

Patricia A. Johnson Professor of Neuroscience

In my laboratory we study the chemical synapse, a specialized junction where neurons communicate with adjacent cells, such as sensory receptors, muscle cells, or other neurons. We are trying to understand how the presynaptic cell at a chemical synapse controls the release of its messenger molecule...
Hsin-Hui Liu
Applied Music Associate
Hsin-Hui Liu is a passionate performer who enjoys various musical career as a soloist, collaborative pianist, chamber musician, and educator. She has presented solo and collaborative recitals in Austria, Canada, China, Taiwan, and the United States. Liu holds a D.M.A in Piano Performance and...
Image of Regina Loehr
Assistant Professor
I am interested in ancient Greek and Roman historiography, ancient popular politics and social movement, emotion and what is often thought of as “subjective” in historical literature, and the application of modern social scientific research to ancient historiography through the shared focus on human...
David Lopatto
Professor

Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor of Natural Science and Mathematics

David Lopatto’s research on the psychology of learning and motivation has come to focus on the learning outcomes of undergraduate experiences in science, especially the effect of undergraduate research experience on student learning, career choice, and attitude. He is the author of several surveys...
Danielle Lussier
Associate Professor

Department chair of Russian, Central European, and Eurasian Studies

Danielle N. Lussier is an associate professor of political science. Her research focuses on democratization, political participation, and religion and politics, with geographic expertise on post-communist Eurasia and Indonesia. She is the author of Constraining Elites in Russia and Indonesia...
Lyons
Professor Senior Faculty

Luther and Jenny Erickson Professor of Chemistry

Research: Professor Lyons' research interests center around a class of materials called electrolytes which are ion conducting solutions (liquids or solids). The topic encompasses physical characterization of ion transport with the application of electrochemical and spectroscopic techniques. A...
Molly MacInnes headshot
Assistant Professor
Professor MacInnes uses electrochemistry to study and design materials and interfaces. She is currently exploring two projects, both motivated by the broad goal of a cleaner, healthier Earth. The first project involves designing and fabricating electrodes that can be used in detecting trace metal...
Michael Mackenzie
Professor
Michael “Mac” Mackenzie is professor of art history at Grinnell College. Prior to his arrival at Grinnell, he taught for 18 years in the Department of Art and Art History at DePauw University in Indiana, and for three years at Wabash College in Indiana. Mackenzie’s special area of research is German...
Assistant Professor

Head Men's & Women's Tennis Coach

Joshua Marshack
Assistant Professor
On leave 2023–24 academic year. Joshua Marshack is a biological anthropologist who uses our closest living relatives, the great apes, as a jumping-off point to study the evolution of social behavior, elucidate the origins of status changes in humans, and challenge biological determinism and...
Elaine Marzluff
Professor

Breid-McFarland Professor of Science

Professor Marzluff teaches Physical Chemistry (CHM 363, 364), General Chemistry (CHM 129), Inorganic & Analytical Chemistry (CHM 210) as well as the Policy Studies seminar (PST320) and the Advanced Policy Research course (PST 420). Professor Marzluff's research focuses on the structure and dynamics...
Kelly
Associate Professor
Kelly Maynard joined the faculty at Grinnell in 2009 after teaching in the history and art history departments at Scripps College. Her current project, entitled Hearing Wagner in France at the Fin-de-Siècle: Music and the Interior World, is an interdisciplinary monograph building upon her doctoral...
Taylor Mayne
Applied Music Associate

Voice

Taylor Mayne, an Iowa native, holds a Bachelor of Music in voice performance from the University of Iowa and an Master of Music in voice performance from Ohio University. He is currently on faculty at Grinnell College as an applied music associate in voice, and Drake University as a teaching artist...
Kent McClelland
Professor Emeritus

Member, Peace and Conflict Studies Committee

I’m a retired faculty member with a continuing research interest in Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) as a lens for understanding sociology. PCT provides an alternative view of human psychology that takes into account the feedback effects of our own actions on our perceptions of the world around us...
Tamara McGavock photo
Assistant Professor
Tamara McGavock, Assistant Professor, received her B.A. in Economics from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. and M.A. from Cornell University. Her teaching and research areas are development economics, economics of gender and the family, and microeconomic theory. She has done field and survey work in...
Eric McIntyre
Professor

Director of Grinnell Symphony Orchestra

Eric McIntyre maintains careers as a conductor, composer, instrumental performer, and educator. At Grinnell College he teaches music composition courses and directs the Grinnell Symphony Orchestra. He also contributes to Grinnell's Liberal Arts in Prison Program, for which he has presented lectures...
Mckee, Christopher
Professor Emeritus
Christopher Fulton McKee was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 14, 1935. In 1957, Mckee graduated from the University of St. Thomas in Houston and in 1960 he completed his Masters of Library Science at the University of Michigan. Since then, McKee has worked at various institutions of higher...
Ellen Mease
Associate Professor Senior Faculty
Ellen directs and teaches European dramatic literature, criticism, theory, and theatre history from the Greeks to Beckett and Stoppard. She also teaches interdisciplinary Humanities classes on ancient Greece (HUM 101), Roman and early Christian culture (HUM 102), and medieval/Renaissance culture...
Meehan
Senior Faculty

McCay-Casady Professor of Humanities

Angelo Mercado
Professor
Part of what attracted Angelo Mercado as a college freshman to Classical Latin was the language’s antiquity. It didn’t take long for Angelo to fall in love with its sound and rhythm. His excitement grew to include the comparison of texts from different languages, embracing Greek and languages of...
Kara Metzger
Applied Music Associate

Symphonic Band

Kara Metzger is originally from Waukesha, WI. She earned a bachelor’s in music education and a certificate in adaptive music from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and has also earned a master’s degree in music education from the University of Minnesota Duluth. While at UMD, she was a teaching...
Deborah
Associate Professor
Deborah L. Michaels, Associate Professor of Education, teaches courses in History of Education, International and Comparative Education, General Teaching Methods, and Social Studies Methods. She also mentors student teachers receiving their secondary-school teaching license in any of the social...
Laura Michelson
Assistant Professor

Project Archivist

Laura Michelson (she/they) is the Project Archivist working with the Salisbury House Library Collection at Grinnell College Special Collections. Her project term began in August 2020 and is through the summer of 2024. As Project Archivist, they are working to curate the SHLC by integrating it into...
Joe
Professor
Joe's research interests lie in mathematical logic, which is a field that develops tools to calibrate the complexity of various mathematical objects. By arguing that the objects guaranteed to exist by a theorem must be complicated, it is possible to conclude that any proof of that theorem must...
Ryan Miller
Assistant Professor
Ryan's statistical research interests involve penalized regression modeling approaches, which include well-known methods like the LASSO and elastic net, non-convex penalties such as MCP and SCAD and their variants, as well as structured approaches like the group LASSO. These models are attractive in...
Karie Miller standing under a tree
Visiting Assistant Professor
Karie Miller (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator specializing in belonging, and the content, behavior, and containers that promote it, primarily through acts of care, play, and joy. She works with and against the existing theatrical canon and industry to explore non...
Martin
Professor Emeritus
Research Professor Minelli's research deals with the synthesis and characterization of molybdenum compounds. Molybdenum compounds act as catalysts for a number of processes, among them olefin metathesis, and molybdenum is also a cofactor in biological systems. The study of these complexes helps to...
Charles Miranda
Applied Music Associate

Viola/Violin

Andrew
Professor
Research Professor Mobley's research interests involve the application of physical organic techniques to organometallic compounds. His current research involves the synthesis of transition metal stannylenes with particular interest in the synthesis of a novel class of these molecules in which the...
Sandy Moffett
Professor Emeritus
Sandy Moffett joined the Grinnell faculty in 1971 and teaches Acting, Directing and American Theatre. Although now Emeritus, he continues to teach and direct when called upon. He is also devoted to conservation and prairie restoration and has been responsible for the restoration and preservation of...
Philippe
Professor
Professor Philippe Moisan is from Brittany. He holds a D.E.U.G. in Literature and Visual Arts, and a Licence in Literature from the University of Caen (Normandy). He also has a M.A. and a PhD from Wahington University in Saint Louis. His research and teaching focus on fiction on the 19th and the...
Petrouchka Moïse
Assistant Professor

Cultural & Community-based Digital Curator

Dr. Petrouchka Moïse is Assistant Professor / Cultural & Community-based Digital Curator at Grinnell College Libraries. As an artist/scholar, she teaches classes on visual and material culture and curatorial studies, focusing on the Caribbean. In her role as Cultural and Community-Based Digital...
Clara Montague
Instructor
Clara Montague is a lecturer in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College as well as a doctoral candidate in Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation project, Women’s Studies Worldwide, examines the transnational history of this interdisciplinary...
Mark
Senior Faculty

Donald L. Wilson Professor of Enterprise and Leadership

Mark Montgomery is a Donald L. Wilson Professor of Enterprise and Leadership, and Professor of Economics, at Grinnell College. Mark teaches Mathematical Economics, the Economics of Education, and Environmental Economics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1982. His...
Thomas Moore
Professor Emeritus
My scholarship has mostly been in statistics education, where I have contributed journal articles, organized and participated in sessions and panels at national meetings, edited one book for the Mathematical Association of America, and participated and occasionally chaired committees of the MAA or...
Emily Moore
Professor Emeritus
Emily's research is in combinatorics. She has published papers in graph theory (where G is a graph, v is a vertex, and chi is the chromatic number of a graph) and in difference sets (where G is a group, v is the order of the group, and chi is a group character). Outside of work, Emily enjoys playing...
Henry Reitz
Professor

George A. Drake Professor of Religious Studies

Henry W. Morisada Rietz is a Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College and an alumnus of the College. He received his M.Div. and his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary and is the associate editor of the Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project. His...
Paul Munyon
Emeritus
Paul Munyon, Associate Professor, earned his B.A. at Westmar College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard. He teaches accounting, finance and industrial organization. His current research focuses on challenges to finance theory posed by high-tech IPOs.
Mutti
Emeritus

Sidney Meyer Professor of International Economics

John “Jack” Mutti, Sidney Meyer Professor of International Economics, has a B.A. from Earlham College, and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He teaches and does research on international economics and public finance.
Abhinaba Nandy
Assistant Professor
Abhinaba Nandy, Assistant Professor, completed his pre-doctoral studies at the University of Calcutta and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in India followed by a PhD in Economics from Virginia Tech, with research interests in Industrial Organization, Behavioral Economics and...
David Neville

Digital Liberal Arts Specialist

David Neville is a Digital Liberal Arts Specialist in the Grinnell College Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative. Originally trained as a medievalist and Germanist, David is the author of over 50 articles, posters, and presentations on topics related to the digital humanities, immersive computing...
Asian woman with dark medium-long hair and glasses against greenery.
Assistant Professor
Laura W. Ng is a historical archaeologist with a research focus on the archaeology of transpacific migration and Asian diasporic communities. She conducts archaeological research on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese migration and the transpacific circulation of people, goods, and...
Qing Nie
Assistant Professor
I received a Bachelor of Arts in international business from Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (China) in 2018, and doctorate in economics from Texas Tech University (U.S. Texas) in 2023. My recent research focuses on the interaction of macroeconomic policy and energy market volatilities...
Collin Nolte
Assistant Professor
Collin's PhD studies included both mathematics and biostatistics, and his research interests involve developing more robust methods for modeling repeated measures and time-series data, particularly as it relates to eye-tracking. His PhD work included development of the `bdots` software, or the...
heesu
Assistant Professor
Heesu Oh is a second language acquisition and bilingualism researcher. Her research has focused on the beliefs in language learning and teaching in Japanese education, and bilingualism for the children who have two or more ethnic backgrounds. Her first book, titled あなたの知らないバイリンガルの世界:日本語教師読本(The...
Photo of Eric Ohrn, a bald man with a beard wearing a blue shirt and smiling
Associate Professor
Eric Ohrn, Associate Professor, received a B.A in Math and Economics at Grinnell College and Ph.D in Economics from the University of Michigan. Professor Ohrn’s teaching focuses on the areas Public Finance, Corporate Finance, and Accounting. His research examines the impact of federal tax policy on...
Christopher Olsen
Assistant Professor
Visiting Professor Chris taught statistics at Washington High School before moving into administrative work as an assessment specialist in the Cedar Rapids, IA, community schools. He comes to Grinnell after teaching at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon. With undergraduate majors in mathematics and...
Photograph of Anna Olsen
Assistant Professor
Anna joined Grinnell College after nearly a decade in industry, including positions at the United States Geological Survey and Risk Management Solutions, a global catastrophe modeling company. Anna’s doctoral and post-doctoral research and her work in industry focused on the mathematical modeling of...
Portrait of Daniel Oore
Daniel Oore is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and scholar. As a featured sound artist, instrumentalist, composer-arranger, actor, and dancer, working in major venues across North America, Europe, Australia, and beyond, Dani’s collaborations have garnered accolades from leading...
pm
Associate Professor
Peter-Michael Osera received his B.S. in Computer Science and Applied and Computational Math Sciences and B.A. in the Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington in 2006 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. He is currently an...
Professor Emeritus
Russell K. Osgood graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1969 with exceptional distinction in history. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1969-71, returned to Yale in 1971, edited the Yale Law Review and received the J.D. degree in 1974. He entered private practice in Boston, became associate professor...
Visiting Language Instructor

Rennes Fellow

photo of Dr. Meredith Paker
Assistant Professor
Meredith Paker, Assistant Professor, received a B.A. in Economics from the University of Georgia and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Oxford (Nuffield College), where she was a Marshall Scholar. Professor Paker’s research and teaching areas are economic history, labor...
Orestis Papaioannou
Assistant Professor
Orestis Papaioannou is an assistant professor in the Psychology department. They are particularly interested in the neural mechanisms behind working memory and attention, as well as applying electrophysiological approaches to novel questions. From 2015 to 2021 they worked with Dr. Steve Luck...
Applied Music Associate

Low Brass

Photo of Jen Paulhus.
Professor
Jen works in a field of math called arithmetic geometry. Her research blends ideas from geometry, algebra, and number theory. And no, it doesn't mean that she is any good at arithmetic. Her research has taken her all over the world, most recently to Chile where she spent 3 months as a Fulbright...
Assistant Professor

Head Football Coach; Assistant Track Coach

Headshot of Mo Pelzel

Director of Academic Technology

Morris Pelzel is the Director of Academic Technology for Grinnell College. Mo earned the Ph.D in religious studies from the Catholic University of America, and for twelve years was a full-time faculty member at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana, where he offered a wide range of courses in...
Professor of Spanish
Professor
Professor Pérez hails from San Pedro Sula, Honduras via New Orleans, La. She loves introducing students to early modern texts and integrating digital humanities assignments in her courses. In her free time Professor Pérez paints and spends time with her family. She is proud to call Grinnell College...
Unfolding the Myth, One Pixel at a Time
Assistant Professor
Nich L. Perez is a Filipino - American filmmaker, educator, producer, creative director and collaborator, researcher, artist, and professional storyteller based in Austin, TX, Los Angeles, CA, and Grinnell, IA. He has a knack for telling stories that matter told through the lens of empathy and...
David
Lecturer

Writing Laboratory Assistant

Originally from Mexico City, David earned his bachelor degree in English from the University of Iowa and his MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State, where he was a Pearl Hogrefe Fellow and fiction editor for the literary journal Flyway. He has taught college writing for seven years...
Leah Perlmutter
Assistant Professor
Research Interests Computer Science Education, Belonging in Post-Secondary Computer Science Courses Fall 2023: CSC 213 Operating Systems and Parallel Algorithms Spring 2024: CSC 151 Functional Problem Solving Spring 2024: CSC 324 Software Design and Development
Tony Perman
Associate Professor

Director of Zimbabwean Mbira Ensemble

Tony Perman (ethnomusicology) is a specialist in the music of Zimbabwe and the semiotics of music and emotion. He has received degrees from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (PhD), the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (MMus), and Kenyon College (BA). Before coming to...
John Petrus
Assistant Professor
John Petrus received his PhD from Ohio State University in 2015. His dissertation project, entitled “Dragging Down Hegemony: Gender Transgression in Contemporary Managua", addresses how traditional gender roles and heteronormativity are being questioned and protested in contemporary Nicaragua...
Hai-Dang
Associate Professor
Hai-Dang Phan has taught ethnic American literature, the craft of poetry, introduction to literary analysis, and studies in genre (the essay). He is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Creative Writing . His poems have been published in The New Yorker , Poetry , Best American Poetry...
Nick Phillips
Associate Professor
Nick Phillips received his PhD from Indiana University in 2014. His dissertation, titled “Space and the City: Peripheral Communities of Madrid and Barcelona”, focused on the production and representation of suburban spaces in contemporary Spanish detective fiction. His research and scholarly...
Viktoria Poetzl
Assistant Professor
Drawing on intersectional feminist approaches, Viktoria Pötzl’s research investigates the global relationship between gender, nationhood, and belonging. Before arriving to Grinnell in Fall 2019, she taught German studies, Jewish studies, and German language for over a decade across Europe, Russia...
Irene
Emerita
Irene Powell is Professor of Economics at Grinnell College. She teaches Econometrics, the Economics of Developing Countries, Health Economics, and the Economics of Gender. Irene received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1985. She has done research in the areas such as the...
Vida
Professor
Developmental Genetics and Cell Biology Directed changes in the shape of epithelial sheets are required to create many of the major tissues in animals, including the intestinal system, kidneys, lungs, and skin. Although our understanding of epithelial sheet morphogenesis has advanced in recent years...
Vanessa Preast

Associate Director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment

Vanessa Preast earned a doctorate in education, with an emphasis on curriculum and instructional technology, from Iowa State University and a doctorate in veterinary medicine from University of Florida. Vanessa is passionate about excellence in teaching and learning within college environments so...
Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor & Director of GORP

Amanda is an Assistant Professor in Physical Education and the Director of the Grinnell Outdoor Recreation Program (GORP). Prior to coming to Grinnell, Amanda was the Assistant Director for Student Development and the Adventure Program at the University of Maryland. She completed her undergraduate...
Elizabeth Prevost
Professor
Elizabeth Prevost, Frederick L. Baumann Professor of History, is a historian of modern Britain and the Empire/Commonwealth; colonial Africa; global Christianity; women and gender; and reading, publishing, and literary celebrity. She is the author of The Communion of Women: Missions and Gender in...
Taylor Price
Lecturer

Writing Laboratory Assistant

Taylor holds a PhD in political science (with concentrations in African politics, international relations, and gender and women’s studies). She especially enjoys working with students on brainstorming, long-term writing projects, and applications for grad school, awards, and internships.
Sarah Purcell
Professor

L.F. Parker Professor of History

Sarah Purcell, L.F. Parker Professor of History, graduated from Grinnell with a B.A. in history in 1992. She went on to earn an A.M. (1993) and a Ph.D. (1997) from Brown University. She joined the faculty of Grinnell in 2000 after teaching at Central Michigan University. Ms. Purcell's research...
Dewa Ayu Putri
Lecturer
Dewa Ayu Eka Putri is a Balinese artist-anthropologist and is currently a Lecturer of Dance at Grinnell College. She teaches courses on Balinese Dance and Performing Arts, specializing in traditional and contemporary dance styles. Putri also maintains her position as dance instructor at the...
Lecturer
Comparative physiology and functional morphology; exercise physiology & psychology I was originally trained as a comparative physiologist and functional morphologist, but since coming to Iowa, I have become increasingly focused on human exercise. I am interested in how people feel when they exercise...
Sharon Quinsaat
Associate Professor
Sharon Quinsaat received her PhD in Sociology from University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching interests include social movements, migration, Southeast Asia, and Asian Americans from a global and transnational perspective. Sharon’s projects and courses to date reflect her intellectual and...
Craig Quintero
Professor
As the Artistic Director of the Taipei-based Riverbed Theatre Company, Craig has written and directed over fifty original image-based performances, including productions in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, France, Germany, and the United States. He is also a sculptor and installation artist...
Eric Ragan
Assistant Professor

Head Women's Volleyball Coach; Assistant Track and Field Coach

Christopher Ralston
Associate Professor
Chris Ralston is a licensed psychologist in the state of Iowa. As a co-author of the Juvenile Sexual Offender Recidivism Risk Assessment Tool - II (JSORRAT-II), his research focuses on factors predictive of sexual recidivism amongst individuals already detected for historical sexual offenses. In...
Stacey Ramirez
Applied Music Associate Lecturer

Percussion

Stacey Bostwick-Ramirez is currently a faculty member at Grinnell College and Des Moines Area Community College. She has presented clinics for the Percussive Arts Society and the Illinois Summer Youth Music Festival. Stacey maintains a private teaching studio at Rieman Music and her students have...
Samuel A. Rebelsky
Professor
Samuel A. Rebelsky is a Professor of Computer Science at Grinnell College. "SamR", as his students call him, has been at Grinnell since 1997. He therefore considers himself part of the Grinnell class of 2001; he was made an honorary member of that class at their reunion in 2011. He is also an...
Kayla Reed
Assistant Professor

Discovery, Systems, & Digital Strategy Librarian

Kayla Reed’s research and teaching focuses on diversity and LGBTQ+ issues, with a focus on Asexuality, intersection, and cooperation of library departments, as well as emotional labor in the workforce. She attended Missouri Southern State University where she got her BA in Theatre, English...
Nancy Rempel-Clower
Associate Professor
I use behavioral and neuroanatomical techniques to study the role of prefrontal cortex in emotion and memory. My current work focuses on understanding the contributions of distinct regions of the rat prefrontal cortex to emotional memory.
Prof. Daniel P. Reynolds
Professor

Seth Richards Professor in Modern Languages

Daniel Reynolds has taught in the German studies department at Grinnell College since 1998. His recent book, Postcards from Auschwitz (NYU Press, 2018), explores the relationship between tourism and Holocaust remembrance, a topic he has been researching since 2007. His book looks at the ways museums...
Assistant Professor
Jordan Reznick is a photo historian and photographer who researches Native North American, settler colonial, and transgender histories of photography. His current research examines how Indigenous ecological science shaped nineteenth-century landscape photographs in California. Reznick was 2022-2023...
Assistant Professor
Professor Rios' teaching and research focuses on creating dialogues across philosophical traditions such as decolonial and postcolonial theories, western/continental political philosophy, and Latin American and Africana philosophies. His scholarly work seeks to develop philosophical frameworks and...
Image of Fredo in London
Assistant Professor
Art and architectural historian Fredo Rivera ‘06 is Assistant Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where they teach classes on modern and contemporary architecture and urban visual culture, as well as the art of the Americas, with a focus on the Caribbean. Professor Rivera’s research...
Dianne
Associate Professor Emeritus
Plants, like animals, begin life as a single cell, the fertilized egg or zygote. This single cell undergoes growth, cell division and differentiation to produce an embryo, or immature plant. This developmental process is called embryogenesis. Since all cells of the embryo are produced through...
Liz Rodrigues
Associate Professor

Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian (On leave FY24-FA25)

Liz Rodrigues is Associate Professor, Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian. Liz’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of critical digital studies , digital humanities practice, and twentieth-century multiethnic U.S. literatures . Her book, Collecting Lives: Critical Data...
Leo Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Research Interests Conformal Symmetries and Black Holes Gravity/CFT Correspondence String Theory & Quantum Gravity Generalized Complex Geometries and String Theory Geometry and Topology of Physics
Shanshan Rodriguez
Assistant Professor
Research interests: Blackhole Thermodynamics, Duality of Gravitational and Condensed Matter Physics, Plasma Astrophysics, Numerical General Relativity.
John Rommereim
Professor

Blanche Johnson Professor of Music

John Rommereim is Blanche Johnson Professor of Music at Grinnell College, where he conducts the Grinnell Singers and the Grinnell Oratorio Society, and teaches composition. His choral works have been performed by distinguished ensembles across the U.S., including Magnum Chorum, the Princeton Singers...
Jackson Roper
Associate Professor
Monty Roper is a cultural anthropologist interested in the political economy of natural resource management, indigenous social movements, Non-governmental organizations, and community development. His research has focused on small-scale rural indigenous and agricultural communities in Latin America...
Rudolph, Bill

Writing Center Instructor

Prior to joining the Writing, Reading, and Speaking Center in 2016, Bill taught AP English, humanities, and other writing and literature courses at Grinnell High School. Bill—who wrote his master’s thesis on the poetry of alumnus Edward Hirsch ’72—has published poems in Barrow Street, Midwest Review...
Photo of Joshua Ruiter
Assistant Professor
Joshua studies algebraic groups, which are kind of like houseboats. A houseboat is both a house and a boat, so building one involves solving engineering problems common to houses (plumbing) and problems common to boats (floating). Additional complications emerge from the interplay of the two...
Elias
Assistant Professor
Elias G. Saba received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He was awarded the British Association of Islamic Studies – De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World 2018 for his dissertation. His first monograph, Harmonizing...
Gemma Sala
Associate Professor
On leave 2023–24 academic year.
Lecturer

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

Josh Sandquist
Associate Professor

Department chair of General Science

Research Approach As a Center for Xenopus Research (a fabricated distinction, but it sounds cool), the Sandquist lab uses a combination of molecular, biochemical, and cell biological approaches to study various aspects of cell division in the frog embryo. Not just any frog, mind you. We use that...
Assistant Professor
Sanou hails from Burkina Faso, West Africa, and is a dancer, choreographer, musician, storyteller, and director of the In-Out Dance Festival in Burkina Faso. He is a winner of the highly selective and prestigious U.S. State Department Scholarship Fulbright 2018–2019 where he taught "History and...
Ralph
Professor
Professor Savarese has been on the faculty at Grinnell for 21 years. He has also taught at Deerfield Academy, Keene State College, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, the University of Florida, Duke University, and the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 2012-2013, he was a fellow at Duke University’s...
Gina Schlesselman-Tarango
Associate Professor

Science Librarian

Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (she/her) is an interdisciplinary librarian and scholar who writes about critical information literacy in academic libraries and the gender and racial dynamics at play in information work more broadly. Her work has appeared in Exploring Equitable and Inclusive Pedagogies...
Mark Schneider
Professor Emeritus
Mark has taught nearly every course in the physics major curriculum, and developed complete curricular materials for four of them (General Physics I & II, Mechanics, and Computational Physics). He has published articles on much of this curricular development work. His scholarly interests are wide...
Alan Schrift
Emeritus

F Wendell Miller Professor of Philosophy Emeritus

Alan Schrift’s scholarship focuses on 19th- and 20th-century French and German philosophy. In addition to over 80 published articles or book chapters on Nietzsche and 20th-century European philosophy, he is the author of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers (Blackwell 2006...
Kesho Scott
Senior Faculty
She is an internationally renowned Diversity Trainer/Consultant, an Associate Professor of American Studies and Sociology at Grinnell College, and an award-winning writer. Kesho was a founding member of International Capacity Building Services, a cultural competency training team that specializes in...
Janet
Emerita
Janet Seiz, Associate Professor, has a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Duke University. She teaches economic development and income distribution courses, and is researching feminist economics and economic methodology.
Assistant Professor
My research focuses on cultural interactions between Japanese and Koreans in the process of decolonization across a wide range of media, including literature, theater, and performance, with a particular interest in the history of Zainichi Koreans—Koreans who migrated to Japan under Japanese colonial...
Lee
Professor Senior Faculty
Professor Sharpe is interested in the development of environmental chemical sensors based on fluorescent, powdered, semiconductor materials. He and his students have found that these materials indicate the presence of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide (precursor of acid rain) by the decrease in the...
Eiren Shea
Associate Professor
Eiren Shea is Associate Professor of Art History at Grinnell College, where she offers classes on the arts of pre-modern Asia. Her book, Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange (Routledge, 2020) focuses on textiles and dress of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth...
Photo of Jen Shook with books
Assistant Professor
Jen Shook is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Dance, & Performance Studies, whose practice lives at the intersections of dramaturgy, directing, literature, cultural memory, Indigenous studies. community engagement, and digital liberal arts. She previously taught at Grinnell as a Fellow in the...
Karen Shuman
Professor
When Karen went to college, she was convinced that she would be an English and history double major. Her first-year proof-based calculus class changed her plans completely. The main courses she teaches at Grinnell are related to analysis, her area of expertise. She has published papers on signal...
Stephen
Associate Professor
Professor Sieck's research is focused on the development of new synthetic organic methodology to generate biologically active molecules. Link to Summer 2014 Research Description
Jose
Associate Professor
Mr. Silva came to Grinnell from the University of Chicago where he wrote a dissertation on Chilean middle-class unions. Mr. Silva's work examines how the middle class contributed to the rise of powerful leftist parties in Chile. These research interests show up in the courses he teaches on U.S...
Erik Simpson
Professor

Samuel R. and Marie-Louise Rosenthal Professor of Humanities

Erik Simpson's literature courses focus on British writing from Shakespeare to the present, especially the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His primary research field is British and transatlantic literature of the Romantic period. He was the Principal Investigator for Grinnell...
Laura Sinnett
Associate Professor Senior Faculty
The general goal of my research program is to document the dynamic functioning of personality across different social situations. Specifically, I am interested in (a) the extent to which personality traits wax and wane across time—both short- and long-term, (b) predicting these changes in...
Paul Smith headshot
Professor
Paula Vene Smith’s recent publications include “ Refashioning Diary Studies: The Tradition of Black Women’s Diaries ” in a/b: Autobiography Studies and (forthcoming) “Day Today: Circadian Rhythms and the Sense of Unending in Poetic Diaries by Gertrude Stein and Harryette Mullen” in the Journal of...
Pat Smith
Applied Music Associate

Guitar

Pat Smith started playing guitar in 1969 and began teaching in 1974. Growing up in the Chicago area he has always been deeply into Blues and R&B music. Attended two years at Coe College playing in the jazz band and show choir. Graduated from Cornell College in 1987. Many years of professional...
smith
Professor Emeritus
D. A. Smith has taught history at Grinnell since 1970; during the 1960s he studied and taught history at Yale University. He has also been (1993 and 1997) Concurrent Professor of History in Nanjing University, China. His scholarly and teaching interests focus upon nineteenth-century British...
Applied Music Associate

Woodwinds

Jennifer Snook
Lecturer
I was born and grew up in Germany as an Army brat. I spent most of my childhood there, but after traveling the U.S., I consider Colorado my home. I received my B.A. from the University of Augusta, in Georgia while my dad was stationed at Fort Gordon. I moved to Colorado and received my Ph.D. from...
Greg Sojka
Applied Music Associate

Voice

Greg Sojka is delighted to join the Grinnell College music faculty! A native Iowan, Greg spent most of his professional career in the Pacific Northwest, where he was active as a performer, university/private voice instructor, conductor, clinician, writer and administrator. Greg has sung...
Headshot of Tierney Steelberg, wearing glasses and smiling at the camera.

Digital Liberal Arts Specialist

Tierney Steelberg (she/her) is a Digital Liberal Arts Specialist at the DLAC (Digital Liberal Arts Collaborative) and a co-lead of the Vivero Digital Fellows program. She has a Master’s degree in Information Science from the University of Michigan, and prior to arriving at Grinnell she was the...
Applied Music Associate

Horn

susan_strauber
Senior Faculty
Susan Strauber is professor of art history with senior faculty status. For much of her career, her scholarship was concerned with the historical and critical examination of the paintings of Eugène Delacroix; the problematic estate stamp on Delacroix drawings and the construction of Delacroix's...
Sullivan
Professor Emeritus
Cell Biology / Developmental Biology I am interested in the formation of sensory structures during neural development in vertebrate embryos. Most of my work with students at Grinnell has focused on lens formation in chicken embryos (a lens from a four day old embryo is shown in Figure 1). We have...
Photo of Xiaoxue (Wendy) Sun
Assistant Professor
Dr. Wendy (Xiaoxue) Sun completed her Ph.D. in the Comparative Literature and German Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2022. Her academic journey has been defined by diverse interests and expertise, primarily centered around Asian-German Studies, Memory Studies, Gender and...
Jim swartz
Professor Senior Faculty
Director of the 1995-1997 and 2005-2008 Noyce Science Center Renovation and Expansion Projects. Dean of the College and Vice President of Academic Affairs, 1998-2008. Chair of the Science Division, 1990-1994. Legislative Aide in the Washington D.C. office of Representative Claudine Schneider of...
Qjaomei
Assistant Professor
Trained a literary scholar, my research and teaching engage a diverse array of literary texts from pre-modern China. I am particularly interested in the relationships between gender and genre, literature and politics, and poetry and painting of medieval China. My first book project, based on my...
Maria Tapias
Professor
On Leave fall 2022 through spring 2023. Maria Tapias earned her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has been teaching at Grinnell since 2001. Her research interests include women's and infants' health, the anthropology of emotions, the impacts of neoliberalism on...
This is a head shot of Professor Tavares
Assistant Professor
Nicky Tavares is a multimedia arti st whos e work sheds light on systemic inequalities through personal storytelling. Her work has evolved through an array of media – photography, film, video, animation, sculpture, VR 360, as well as across film genres and presentation formats such as documentary...
smiling male, wearing green jacket and multicolored shirt
Professor
Justin Thomas is Professor of Theatre and Design in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Grinnell College. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Theatrical Design from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts and Communication from Kalamazoo College. In...
Paul Tjossem
Professor
Research interests include non-linear laser spectrometry, trace atom and molecule detection, and electromagnetic puzzles. Selected Research Students & Projects V. Cornejo '98 "Thomson's Jumping Ring" K. Ni '09 "Computed Tomography and the Radon Transform" F. Friesen '10 "FPGA" E. C. Brost '10...
Andrea Tracy
Associate Professor

Associate Dean for Student Academic Life

My primary research interest is ingestive behavior - specifically, the role of learning in food choice and food motivation, with a particular focus on how these influence, and are influenced by, obesity. My lab uses a rat model to study the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying these processes...
Tricoire
Assistant Professor
Professor Marion Tricoire (Ph.D., Emory University) is a teacher and scholar of African Literature and of the Francophone world. Her research interests include Sub-Saharan African literature, Francophone studies, urban humanities, postcolonial literatures, migration and diaspora studies, and...
Elizabeth
Professor
Professor Trimmer is interested in the structure and mechanism of enzymes. Her research has focused on enzymes that perform oxidation/reduction reactions using the coenzyme flavin.
Barbara Trish
Professor

Director of Rosenfield Program

Professor of Political Science and Director of the Rosenfield Program in Public Affairs, International Relations, and Human Rights and Professor of Political Science, with a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. Ms. Trish is a generalist in U.S politics, with political parties, electoral politics...
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Associate Professor

Sidney Meyer Professor of International Economics

Hâle Utar is the Sidney Meyer Endowed Chair in International Economics and an Associate Professor, a research fellow at IZA, a member of CESifo, and an Associate Editor at The Review of International Economics. She completed her undergraduate degree at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and obtained her...
Roger Vetter
Professor Emeritus
Javanese gamelan music is Vetter's primary research area. He has carried out research on this subject in the central Javanese city of Yogyakarta during several visits between 1973 and 2017. These research visits have resulted in published articles on Javanese musical traditions in journals such as...
Donna Vinter
Assistant Professor

Director, Grinnell-in-London

Donna Vinter, adjunct professor of English literature and Resident Site Director, spent a formative year in London as a graduate student working in the British Library to complete a thesis on English medieval drama. Within a year of obtaining her Ph.D in English Literature from Harvard University...
Vishevsky, Anatoly02.JPG
Professor Emeritus
Anatoly Vishevsky taught at Washington University in St. Louis and was a faculty member at the Middlebury College Summer Russian School. He came to Grinnell College in 1994, and has taught all levels of our language sequence, Russian literature in translation, tutorials, and a number of senior...
Nadia Vossoughi
Assistant Professor
I am a social psychologist with a focus on intergroup relations research. As an intergroup relations researcher, I am interested in the causes and consequences of intergroup inequality as well as factors that promote social change. I pursue these interests in two related lines of research. In my...
Nicholas Wagner
Assistant Professor
Dr. Wagner earned his PhD from the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota in 2019. Beginning in the fall of 2019, he started teaching at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where he taught Latin, and courses in translation on Greek and Roman history...
Henry
Professor Emeritus
Distinguished Educator, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2013 Award for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Community by ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) 10 textbooks over 70 columns for ACM/SIGCSE Inroads over 165 published papers, articles, reports...
Standing by Waimea Canyon in July 2022
Assistant Professor
Joe is a mathematician specializing in p-adic numbers, combinatorics, and mathematical physics, though he is generally interested in finding connections between these subjects and other areas of mathematics. He is currently working on asymptotic problems involving homogeneous spaces, gauge theories...
Jerod Weinman
Associate Professor
Courses Taught CSC 105: The Digital Age CSC 151: Functional Problem Solving with Scheme CSC 207: Algorithms and Object-Oriented Design CSC 213: Operating Systems and Parallel Algorithms CSC 261: Artificial Intelligence CSC 295: Computer Vision Primary Academic Interests Computer Vision, Machine...
Cameron Welke holding a lute
Applied Music Associate

Lute

Cameron Welke spends most of his time explaining to well-meaning strangers that the lute is, in fact, quite a different instrument from the flute. He brings a passionate curiosity and a deep creative drive to all manner of historical plucked instruments, which he plays with “expert technical...
Katy Wells
Visiting Instructor
Katy is teaching a Wilson Center short course in the fall 2023 semester titled Creating Marketing Campaigns. She is owner and brand consultant at Double You Marketing, Inc, running project-based marketing campaigns from strategy through implementation. Before starting her own business, she developed...
Photograph of Jonathan Wells wearing bowtie
Assistant Professor
Jonathan is a probabilist and mathematical statistician whose research interests lie in random matrix theory, a discipline that originally arose from an interest in estimating the covariance matrix of a random sample obtained from a multivariate population, and which now finds use across several...
Westphalen, Melinda.jpg
Applied Music Associate Lecturer

Piano

Dr. Melinda Westphalen received her Bachelor or Music degree from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she studied with Professor Robert Lawrence. She went on to receive both her Master of Arts and Doctorate of Musical Arts degrees in piano performance and pedagogy from the University of Iowa, where she...
Applied Music Associate

Voice

John Whittaker
Professor Senior Faculty
John Whittaker (BA Cornell U. 1975, PHD U. of Arizona 1984) has been teaching at Grinnell since 1984. He considers himself an anthropological archaeologist, which means that while he prefers working with ancient people, he considers himself free to snoop into any aspect of human life, and all people...
Eliza Willis
Professor Emerita
Before joining the Grinnell College faculty in 1991, Professor Willis taught political science and political economy at Boston College and Tulane University. Her research focuses on Latin American politics and her work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies, Latin American Research...
Royce Wolf
Associate Professor
Royce studies spherical virtual knots, a concept defined and explored by his summer research students. Characterizing these knots relies on interplay between combinatorics, topology and algebra. Royce plays piano and gives recitals on a regular basis, both solo and with others. He provides...
Visiting Instructor
dong_yang_profile
Assistant Professor
I primarily work on and write about comparative intellectual history and global avant-garde cinema. As a die-hard comparatist, I am currently interested in how Chinese artists and intellectuals from the twentieth century onward interpret, problematize, and reconfigure western discourse on modernity...
A photo of Wenqi sitting on a chair
Lecturer

Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow

As a dedicated qualitative scholar, my focus is centered on exploring the evident and latent forms of gendered violence experienced by Chinese and Chinese American populations. I have presented my findings in three peer-reviewed articles and presented at numerous conferences. I started my scholarly...
Mervat
Associate Professor
Mervat Youssef is Associate Professor of Arabic. She holds a B.S. from the University of Helwan in Cairo, an M.S. from South Dakota State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Her research interests include media constructions of identity, especially in relation to news coverage of...
James Zabel
Assistant Professor
Experimental High Energy Particle Physics
Professor Emerita
Merle Zirkle taught at Grinnell College for thirty two years, retiring from teaching in the spring of 2000 after having been a full professor of art since 1989. During her tenure she taught ceramics, design, jewelry and sculpture. Prior to 1986 she shared a teaching appointment with her husband...

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