UW Professor Zibrak Receives Seibold Professorship

Arielle Zibrak, a University of Wyoming professor of English, is the recipient of the Seibold Professorship for 2025-26.

The Seibold award -- given annually to UW College of Arts and Sciences faculty members who are focused on teaching -- will enable Zibrak to further develop her professional and teaching life within the emerging field of public humanities. The focus on the public humanities is both critical and timely, as the Department of English launched a new Ph.D. program in the public humanities at the beginning of the fall 2024 semester.

She’ll spend her year in Connecticut and Boston, consulting with program faculty and directors at Boston University, Yale University and Brown University about their experiences strengthening similar programs.

Simultaneously, she will work to complete her book-project-in-progress, “In the Image of Desire,” a popular history of how the power-of-positive-thinking movement, New Thought, shaped women’s culture in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. The project draws on material housed in archives at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, Yale’s Beinecke Library and the New York Public Library.

Zibrak’s public-facing research will be featured in the Mahindra Seminar at Harvard University, which showcases new work by scholars engaging with well-established and emergent methodologies in the history of American culture, politics and aesthetics with an interdisciplinary lens.

“I’m grateful for the support and confidence in my career the university has already demonstrated and hope to continue to give back to our institution, our students and our community here in Wyoming,” Zibrak says.

The Seibold Professorship allows faculty members a year’s leave to pursue in-depth projects and research opportunities that will enrich their teaching as well as advance their professional lives.

For more information, email Zibrak at azibrak@uwyo.edu.