Wayne became a Lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric in 2016, and he was promoted to Associate Professor of Instruction in 2021. He has been teaching classes at the University of Iowa since 2004, first as a Graduate Assistant and then as a Visiting Professor for the Departments of Rhetoric and American Studies and the Tippie College of Business. After growing up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota, he received a BA in English and history from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He later earned his MA and PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa, where he wrote his dissertation on the importance of rural Iowa as a setting in prominent cultural texts during the Great Depression.

His teaching and research interests include visual rhetoric, the history and culture of the rural Midwest, and popular culture representations of American history. He is an active member of the Agricultural History Society, for which he currently serves as the Executive Secretary. He is also a member of the Executive Board of the Mid-America American Studies Association.

His most recent publications are “The Visual Culture of the 1980s Farm Crisis,” a book chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Midwestern History (2025), edited by Jon K. Lauck, and an article, “Midwestern Farmers Go to Washington: Motivations, Experiences, and Outcomes of the 1977-1979 Tractorcades,” published in the Spring 2025 issue of the Middle West Review. Other publications include an article in the November 2022 issue of Agricultural History titled “‘A Moral Duty to Uphold the Family Farm’: The Religious Response to the 1980s Farm Crisis,” and a book chapter, “‘Beautiful Land of Make-Believe’: Rural Iowa in 1930s Hollywood,” which appears in Pieces of the Heartland: Representing Early Twentieth-Century Midwestern Places, (2018), edited by Andy Oler.

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