Mark Barron

I joined the history department in 2015 as an Assistant Adjunct Professor specializing in public history, historic preservation, and material-culture studies. Prior to teaching at Iowa State University, I was an architectural historian with the Georgia Department of Transportation and a contracted cultural resource specialist with the Texas Department of Transportation. I also performed an internship with the Federal Archaeology Program of the National Park Service, served as a seasonal employee with the Historic American Building Survey, and worked as a field archaeologist in Maryland. My current research interests include a study of how tax policy promoted suburban development and metropolitan conflict in the Post-World War Two South, and an examination of how irrigation projects along the Rio Grande River in New Mexico and Texas affected concepts of property rights, agricultural capitalism, and race in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I received my Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2014.