From the Chair

Dear Colleagues, Coworkers, and Friends of the English Department,

Welcome to Reading Matters 32.1, and to the fall semester of 2026. As you can see, our community continues to create and critique with vibrancy and vigor.  I’m particularly gratified to celebrate the festschrift our PQ editors have assembled in honor of our recently retired colleague Florence Boos. It is appropriate that our longest-running journal honor one of our longest serving professors. Please take the time to peruse it when you get the chance, especially Florence’s concluding essay on her career with the English Department. 

Onward!

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Faculty and Instructor Matters

Essays in Honor of Florence S. Boos: Victorian Literature, Workers, and Culture” appeared in Philological Quarterly this summer (104.3-4), guest-edited by Linda K. Hughes, Dallas Liddle, and Anne McKee Stapleton, and under the brilliant leadership of co-editors Jonathan Wilcox and Adam Hooks and managing editor Casey Minot (PhD).  The eleven essays that pay tribute to the remarkable career of Professor Florence Saunders Boos are grouped into four of her most notable areas of contribution: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle; Victorian Poetry, Especially Women’s Poetry; Working-Class Poetry and Prose; and Archival and Cultural Contexts for Literature. The essay “Reflections on Life at Iowa, 1973 – 2025,” by Florence S. Boos, concludes this very “Special Double Issue.”  

During the summer, Harry Stecopoulos chaired the John Hope Franklin Prize committee for the American Studies Association. The Franklin Prize is given to the best work of American Studies published in the preceding year.  Harry’s prose poem “Count Mippopopoulos, the Diabetic,” appeared in Dunce Codex (in English) and Ácoma (in Italian). Harry also published an essay on Joyce Carol Oates in Lit Hub and a piece on Richard Russo in LARB.

Sarah Minor’s visual poem “Our Little Secretary” appeared in the newest issue of APARTMENT Poetry.

Matt Brown’s The Novel and the Blank was a finalist for the SHARP Book Prize, given annually by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.

Florence Boos delivered a Zoom lecture on the topic of “William Morris and Beatrix Potter: Preserving Nature and History” to the annual meeting of the Beatrix Potter Society, sponsored by Special Collections of the University Libraries and held in Iowa City July 18^th . The essay is scheduled to appear in the fall issue of The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies. On July 23^rd, she gave a talk on “William Morris’s Chants: Socialist Songs in the Victorian Press,” at the annual Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Conference held in Dublin, Ireland, and the text is scheduled to appear in an edited collection sponsored by the Midwest Victorian Studies Association, Victorian Musical Culture: The Lost Chord  (Clemson U P, 2027).

Nick Sturm was featured on an episode of the podcast Index for Continuance: "Small Press Histories, or The Productivity of Friction".

Graduate Student Matters

postmedieval published an essay by Thelma Trujillo (PhD) on Mary of Egypt, the first Black woman saint.

Nina Elkadi (NWP)'s article, "When It Comes to Worker Protections on Farms, ‘Big Ag Rules the Roost’" was published in Civil Eats.

Olivia Alsup (PhD) and Josephine Geiger-Lee (PhD) attended the week-long Recovering Hidden Histories in Archival Collections course at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Alfred Lee (NWP) published an essay "On Description," in The Believer and adapted the essay for This American Life.

Alumni Matters

Erin Gray (BA '25), an associate literary agent with The Kepner Agency, sold her first book, Whittier by Doyle Johnson, in a pre-empt deal to St. Martin's Press, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers.

Greg Beatty (PhD '01)’s short story "The Battle of the Standardized Patient" was the winner of the McGovern Center Community Award in Fiction, sponsored by the McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics.

Adam Witte (NWP 2026) will be published in the Spring 2027 issue of The Mississippi Review. An earlier version of this essay, titled "On the Teaching of Semicolons", was included in the thesis Witte submitted for his MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program in Spring of 2026. Since graduation, Witte has been working as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Rhetoric at Iowa.