Naomi Greyser is associate professor of English, American Studies and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, as well as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. In her research and the classroom, Greyser engages the process of knowledge creation, with an eye towards making space for messiness and unpredictability—but not too much!

Greyser’s first book, On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America, was published with Oxford University press in 2017. Her articles appear in journals across the humanities, including American Quarterly, Feminist Studies, American Literature, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literatures in the US.  

With the support of grants from the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute and Iowa’s provost office, she is completing a book that addresses the seemingly simple question: what do humans need to solve problems and explore and express ideas? Unblocked: Writing, Research & the Creative Process (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) lays out rhetorical practices and institutional environments that inspire inquiry for academics across fields and backgrounds.

In the classroom, Greyser cultivates an exploratory, practice-based environment. Students engage civic dialogue to work across multiple perspectives and solve real-world problems. In the spirit of Unblocked, they also undertake creative, research-based projects — work that connects with their passions and aims after graduation.

Greyser earned her PhD in English & Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine with certificates in critical theory and interdisciplinary gender studies. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University before joining the faculty at Iowa and learning to love the prairie.