“We need to start documenting this phenomenon, moving out from the illustrious cases of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University to grasp the reality of an enterprise that now numbers some 350 institutional participants and continues to grow. This enterprise is our literary history.”
– Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
The Program Era Project (PEP) digitally documents the institutional history of creative writing, starting with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW). We currently offer two resources for scholars and students interested in this history: 1) a searchable database of academic and demographic information about IWW cohorts, advisors, and theses, derived from library collections and university records and 2) a series of dashboards displaying stylometric data visualizations produced by computational analyses of a curated corpus of texts published by IWW faculty and students. We are working on expanding these resources to include other UI programs and other institutions, starting with Stanford University.
The PEP is also a research collective, using digital resources to produce original scholarship about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Program Era.
The PEP is supported by the efforts of Principal Investigator Loren Glass and Digital Humanities & Instruction Librarian, Nikki White.
Contact info: loren-glass@uiowa.edu