Celebrating Teresa Mangum's Contributions to the Humanities
With gratitude to a stalwart champion of HWW
As HWW heads into its tenth year, we say a fond farewell to one of the consortium’s most energetic supporters: Teresa Mangum of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. Teresa is retiring after 34 years at Iowa, and 14 as the director of Obermann. We know her colleagues will be singing her praises as she steps away from all the institutional roles and duties which have helped to make Iowa run for many decades. At HWW, we have many reasons to add to that chorus of voices.
Teresa was there at the very beginning of the HWW concept, helping to shape and guide it into what it is today. When I came on as PI in 2015, Teresa was the first one at my door – literally, with a bottle of wine, at my first convening of the consortium in Chicago – with her signature enthusiasm for and knowledge of the humanities both regionally and nationally. Since then she has been a stalwart, serving on selection committees, offering sage and always thoughtful advice, and modeling what a truly imaginative, generous, and free-thinking interlocutor can be.
With Bill Hart-Davidson at MSU, Teresa co-authored a critically important white paper in 2020 (opens as a PDF), which summarized the accomplishments and takeaways of the first two iterations of the project and helped us appreciate how and why the “reciprocity and redistribution” orientation which is now HWW’s signature was the next best step in the consortium’s development. It’s hard to imagine HWW without her. But all that we have learned from her continues to shape how we think about this experiment in collaboration and interdisciplinarity in humanities and arts practice.
Thank you, Teresa, for all you have done and been for us! It’s frankly impossible to contemplate you “retiring” in any way. We wish you great good health and happiness wherever your next adventures take you.
— Antoinette Burton, HWW PI
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