Join us to celebrate National Arts and Humanities Month and to hear highlights from ISU faculty whose research has benefitted from CEAH funding.
Sarah R Kyle (Interim Director of the CEAH), Jason Keith (Senior Vice President and Provost) and Luis Rico-Gutierrez (Dean of the College of Design) will provide opening remarks, and then attendees will have the opportunity to hear from four recipients of CEAH funding: Abby Dubisar, Annemarie Butler, Emily Morgan and Firat Erdim (scroll down to learn more about our speakers).
Event details:
Day: Wednesday, October 15
Time: 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Cardinal Room, Memorial Union
Refreshments provided.
Contact ceah@iastate.edu with questions.
Abby Dubisar
Associate Professor, English
Abby M. Dubisar studies rhetoric and the persuasive strategies that everyday people use to accomplish their goals. With the support of CEAH, she is currently writing a book on activist cookbooks. These cookbooks both subvert and affirm the genre conventions of a cookery text. The forty cookbooks identified and collected so far include expected material, such as recipes and cooking instruction, as well as written and visual communication strategies that persuade readers to care and become informed about the issues that the writers address. These issues include peace, refugee support, and reproductive healthcare, among others. Dr. Dubisar’s publications include essays on peace activist cookbooks from Women Strike for Peace and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as articles and book chapters on beer campaigns to support farmers, Jell-O advertising ideologies, women farmers’ rhetorical strategies to gain legitimacy, a farmer’s communication strategies related to closing her farm, and other studies of how food and farming intersect with persuasion. Her publications have appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech; Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development; Peitho; College English; Community Literacy Journal; Rhetoric Review; Rhetoric of Health and Medicine; Computers and Composition; and other venues.
Annemarie Butler
Associate Professor, Philosophy and Religious Studies
Annemarie Butler is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Professor in Charge of the Applied Artificial Intelligence program. She specializes in 17th and 18th century British philosophy, with emphasis on the metaphysics and epistemology of David Hume and John Locke. Recent publications concern knowledge of the existence of the external world, knowledge of the existence and attributes of God, justification of the belief in one’s own continuation, early modern logic, and naturalism. She teaches ethics of computing and artificial intelligence as well as data ethics. She is a co-founder of Iowa State University’s Ethics Hub and has served as ethics adviser to STEM research grants.
Emily Morgan
Associate Professor, Art and Visual Culture
Emily Kathryn Morgan is an Associate Professor of Art History at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on histories of photography. Her current project considers photographic depictions of labor in American industry. Previous research projects have examined photographs of American industrial-scale meatpacking; the appropriation of magazine imagery in American modernist photography; and photographically illustrated accounts of poverty and street culture in nineteenth-century Britain. She has also engaged in collaborative research that looks at how representations of animals circulate in animal production industries.
Dr. Morgan is the author of two books: Imaging Animal Industry: American Meatpacking in Photography and Visual Culture (University of Iowa Press, 2024); and Street Life in London: Context and Commentary (MuseumsEtc. 2014). She has published articles in Art Journal, History of Photography, Food and History, and Animal Studies Journal, among others. She received her Ph.D. in History and Theory of Art from the University of Arizona.
Firat Erdim
Associate Professor, Architecture
Whether with cast shadows, clouds of ink, or the tow line of a kite, Fırat Erdim’s research explores the interrelationship of lines, materiality, and place to question axioms of architectural imagination. Recent projects such as the Kite Choir and the Field Harp facilitate aesthetic practices of attunement with the atmosphere. The custom instruments developed in these projects are played in collaboration with the wind, making the ebbs and flows of the atmosphere palpable as a dynamic, sonic thickness. The polyphonic, social dimension of these projects asks whether we can act together in relation to our existential medium. This recent work has been performed or exhibited at the 2025 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Versus Art Project (İstanbul), Des Moines Art Center, WORKS+WORDS Biennale (Copenhagen), Adds Donna (Chicago), the 2022 Toneburst Electroextravaganza (Wesleyan University), and the Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, among others. Erdim was awarded the 2015 Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, and a 2016 Santo Foundation Award for Individual Artists. Originally from İzmir, Turkey, he has taught architecture nationally and internationally and is currently an Associate Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University.