Editorial Advisory Committee

The editorial advisory committee of the University of Arkansas Press, also known as the press committee, is the faculty oversight and advisory body that provides editorial guidance, certifies the application of peer review, and consults on issues regarding mission, vision, and planning. The committee meets twice a year to hear operational reports from the director, respond to editorial and peer review reports from the editor-in-chief, and discuss strategic initiatives and institutional development. It comprises a chair, who serves a five-year term; six members, who serve three-year terms; and two external members, who also serve three-year terms. Additionally, the press’s director, its editor-in-chief, and the vice chancellor to whom the press reports serve as ex officio members.

Jeannie Whayne

University Professor

Author or editor of over a dozen university press books, Whayne was the coeditor with Willard B. Gatewood Jr. of the first title published by the University of Arkansas Press: The Governors of Arkansas. Whayne has been professor of history in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas since 1990, where she has served as chair of the department and editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. She has served as chair of the press committee since 2016.

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Geffrey Davis

Associate Professor of English

Geffrey Davis is associate professor of English and teaches in the Program in Creative Writing & Translation and with the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. He author of two collections of poetry: Night Angler (2019), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm (2014), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Atlantic, Crazyhorse, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Oxford American, PBS NewsHour, and Ploughshares. The poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review, he has been named a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and has received the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Porter Fund Literary Prize, and the Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Whiting Foundation for his involvement with The Prison Story Project, which strives to empower incarcerated women and men in Arkansas to tell their own stories through writing.

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Jennifer A. Greenhill

Endowed Professor of Art

Jennifer A. Greenhill’s research focuses on 19th and early 20th century US art and visual culture, although she regularly steps outside of that framework to explore topics such as the visuality of literary humor and the politics of racialized beauty in 1960s film. She is the author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012), and a coeditor of A Companion to American Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), a collection of thirty-five essays by leading scholars who debate the geographic, historiographic, material, and conceptual borders of the field. Greenhill’s current book project explores the efforts of commercial artists, art directors, advertisers, and psychologists to develop visual strategies of suggestive advertising circa 1900.

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Michael Pierce

Associate Professor of History

Michael Pierce is associate professor of history and specializes in the modern US, Arkansas, and labor and race. He received his A.B. from Kenyon College and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University. His book, Striking with the Ballot: Ohio Labor and the Populist Party, appeared in the spring of 2010 from Northern Illinois University Press. Pierce‘s current project looks at race and the labor movement in postwar Arkansas, with a particular emphasis on Little Rock‘s Central High crisis. Pierce is also the co-author of In the Workers‘ Interest: A History of the Ohio AFL-CIO, 1958-1998, co-editor of Builders of Ohio: A Biographical History, and co-editor of the forthcoming Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta: Essays to Mark the Centennial of the Elaine Massacre. His essays have appeared in Labor History, Agricultural History, the Arkansas Historical Quarterly and various edited volumes. He serves as associate editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.

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Shirin Saeidi

Associate Professor of Political Science

Shirin Saeidi is associate professor of political science and the director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Arkansas. She earned a BA in government and politics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her PhD in politics and international studies from Cambridge University. She has published numerous articles and book chapters that have appeared in Gender & History, Citizenship Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, International Studies Review, and the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences. Her book, Women and the Islamic Republic: How Gendered Citizenship Conditions the Iranian State, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.