The music playing on this page is "Dan Sebenarnya" by Yuna
Bio notes:
Deborah Elizabeth Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, Senior Scholar for Digital Arts and Humanities for DSPS, director of the Digital Humanities graduate certificate. and Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Whaley received degrees in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz (BA), California State University, Fullerton (MA), and the University of Kansas (PhD). Her research and teaching fields include the institutional history, theories, and methods of American and cultural studies, 19th and 20th century American cultural history, comparative ethnic studies, Black cultural studies, the digital humanities, popular culture, and the visual arts.
Dr. Whaley has published original art, poetry, as well as articles on social movements, popular culture, sequential art, documentary photography, and film. In 2018, Whaley was nominated for a Rhysling Poetry Award for her long verse poem in the 2018 Bram Stoker Award Finalist book Sycorax's Daughters. She has been a Resident Visiting Scholar at the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was a recipient of a grant from the Monroe Trotter Institute for Black Culture for her research on responses to 9/11 in Black expressive art and in the public sphere.
Her recent book is Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2015); it explores graphic novel production and comic book fandom, looking in particular at African, African American, and multiethnic women as deployed in television, film, animation, gaming, and print representations of comic book and graphic novel characters. Professor Whaley's first book is: Disciplining Women: Alpha Kappa Alpha, Black Counterpublics, and the Cultural Politics of Black Sororities (2010). In it, she examines the cultural practices, cultural work, and politics of the oldest historically Black sorority.
Her book in progress is titled Feeling Her Fragmented Mind: Women, Race, and Dissociative Identities in Popular Culture. It is an examination of dissociative identities (formerly known as multiple personality disorder) as a narrative trope in popular literature, film, television, and memoir, with a particular focus on Latinx, White, Asian/American, and Black women. More than an interpretive and critical analysis of popular cultural productions, Feeling Her Fragmented Mind engages with the intersection of différance, affect, and disability studies and combines the humanities and social sciences to explore the racial, class, and gender disparities in the medical industrial complex. Dr. Whaley's digital projects include an ArcGIS story map, "Transpacific Mappings of Asian/American Women and Dissociation," a 3D/AR virtual exhibition, "Feeling Her Fragmented Mind," Addressing the Crisis, which is an online journal focused on public sphere engagements with the theories of Stuart Hall, and "Fat Bats, Postpunks, Depressed Dills and Ice Witches," which is a sonic analysis of the music of Militia Vox and the comix of Calyn P. Rich.
Whaley was co-curator, with Kembrew McLeod, of the University of Iowa Museum of Art exhibition, "Two Turntables and a Microphone: Hiphop Contexts Featuring Harry Allen's Part of the Permanent Record; Photos From the Previous Century," and she has served as a consultant or feature writer for exhibitions on Black popular music and Black sequential art. Whaley is on the editorial board of the journal American Studies, and formerly served on the editorial board for American Studies: Euroasian Perspectives and Lexington Press' Africana Studies book series. She was the 2013-2014 chair of the Women's Committee for the American Studies Association and now is serving as a committee member for the ASA's committee on departments, programs, and centers.
You can find out about her administrative work at the UI digital studio below (Note: you will want to mute the music on the page by hitting the pause button at the top before watching the video):
