This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently. Register at https://writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently. Register at writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing  Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...

The UI Photography Program, in partnership with the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Gender, and Women’s and Sexuality Studies, welcomes A Yellow Rose Project to the School of Art and Art History. Including work by over 100 women, the project is a photographic collaboration of responses, reflections, and reactions to the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in the United States. The photographs in this collection express a rich, broad...

In this virtual event, E Cram (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) will read from their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West.  The book deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. Cram redefines sexual modernity through...

Prof. emeritus Robert Ketterer (Classics, University of Iowa) will introduce the opera "Medea" by Luigi Cherubini (first perf. 1797) and its production in this season by the Metropolitan Opera with streaming in theaters on Oct. 22. 

“Desperate to solve chemistry’s greatest problem, Justus Liebig made the first Kaliapparat in 1830. That small piece of glassware started something big. The Kaliapparat made Liebig’s name. But lampworked glassware transformed chemistry. Ever since, chemists have used other worlds in glass—the Microheterotopias of my title—to manage matter. Making Microheterotopias relies on skilled scientific glassblowers. This talk explains what happened when chemistry met glassblowing—and why that connection...

“A Chinese Geo-Narrative Painting at the Stanley Museum of Art” Visiting scholar: Elizabeth Kindall, Associate Professor, University of St. Thomas Oct. 26 (Wed) 5:30 p.m. CT, ABW116 or Zoom (register here) https://uiowa.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrd-GoqT0oG9HbMoMnfCKSui75xDimEbSN Hosted by the School of Art and Art History, co-sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies This lecture is free and open to the public. Elizabeth Kindall is...

On Jan. 9, 2020, an Instagram post and a new website from Royal Sussex announced that The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, aka Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, were stepping away from full-time royal duty to live a more private life. Dubbed by the British tabloid’s The Sun as “Megxit,” their seemingly self-imposed exile became non-stop fodder for days as revelations about the long-term planning of the scheme from the couple littered the pages of every online outlet. Watching the tsunami of supportive...

Please join us for a screening of Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden. After the screening, KoRN and GWSS director Hyaeweol Choi will join Corey Creekmur (English, Cinematic Arts) to discuss the impact of Park Chan-wook on cinema.  Open to all.

The Creative and Critical Practice and Pedagogy Obermann Working Group is exploring the potential of creative dissertations Friday, Oct. 28 at 3:30 p.m. on Zoom. They’re reading three online articles by Nick Sousanis, Professor at San Francisco State University and the first of a growing number of scholars translating research into graphic forms.  Free and open to all. For the Zoom link and links to the readings, please contact the group's co-directors, Professor Harry Stecopoulos (harilaos...

UPCOMING POROI SEMINAR (!) Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"   Dr. Vázquez will be circulating the introduction to his book, States of Defeat, for us to workshop with him! He writes, “After over a century of international political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked on the twenty-first century and discerned that revolutionary struggle, previously an instrument for seizing an emancipated future, had somehow run aground. My book, States of...

British lawyer Alexander McLean, the founder of Justice Defenders (formerly African Prisons Project), will discuss his work transforming communities, justice systems, and countries from inside out. Sponsored by the UI Lecture Committee, Center for Human Rights, College of Education, School of Music, International Programs, Citizen Lawyer Program, and Obermann Center supported Prison Writing Project. The event will also be livestreamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Dq6K-wUjE 

Inspiration & exchange across the disciplines For each gathering in the new Wide Lens series, scholars and/or artists from across the university will briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest (pecha kucha–style), and then open the floor to questions and discussion over food and drink at the ever-inspiring Stanley Museum of Art. Wide Lens is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for...

This series of two workshops will focus on best feedback and commenting practices to help students improve their writing and their learning. Faculty from different fields will lead presentations and discussions on the following topics: Commenting on intermediate and final stages of writing projects Teaching commenting and feedback skills to TAs Designing effective peer review sessions Developing and implementing criteria for student self-assessment of writing Vickie Molloy from the...

This series of two workshops will focus on best feedback and commenting practices to help students improve their writing and their learning. Faculty from different fields will lead presentations and discussions on the following topics: Commenting on intermediate and final stages of writing projects Teaching commenting and feedback skills to TAs Designing effective peer review sessions Developing and implementing criteria for student self-assessment of writing Vickie Molloy from the...

Professor Anna Barker (Asian & Slavic Languages & Literatures, UI) will share her enthusiasm for the music of Mozart and the Cedar Rapids Opera production of Cosí fan tutte: The Soap Opera, which will be performed on the following dates:  Jan. 20, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22, 2023 at 2 p.m. At the Paramount Theatre in Cedar Rapids (123 3rd Ave SE). The lecture is organized by the interdisciplinary Opera Studies Forum (via the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies), and is free and open to...

Join us in conversation with journalist, comics artist, and Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Joe Sacco, (Safe Area Gorazde, Paying the Land) interviewed by Rachel Williams for a talk about race, war, identity but also about his personal creative process and the art of comics.  This is part of a three-day event devoted to "Drawing Panels and Crossing Borders: Negotiating Self and Other in Comics" with MariNaomi, Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and Jose Alaniz. Organized by the...

For the next "Racial Reckoning Through Comics" event, we will engage in conversation with artists MariNaomi and Joe Sacco as well as scholars Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and José Alaniz to discuss how colonial dynamics are involved in racialization processes. From the global to the local, from international conflicts to the everyday life in times of peace, our artists’ stories and our scholars’ analyses will explore how the grammar of comics can imagine, write, and draw anti-racist and anti...

Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance “My Electric Genealogy” explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles and the American West through the lens of her own family.  “For nearly 40 years my grandfather worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, designing, planning, and supervising the network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of electricity,” Kanouse explains. “The grid was his...

Join us for a conversation between two University of Iowa students and three key figures of Our Bodies Ourselves, the legendary collective that published the groundbreaking text Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1969. This organization has continued to advocate for reproductive justice—developing powerful and inspiring models of health communication, medical education, legal advocacy and literary publishing on the body. Please register for the webinar-style conversation and Q&A, which will range wide and...

On Thursday, March 2, at 2:30 p.m. CST, Professors Tara Bynum (English, CLAS) and Kabria Baumgartner (History and Africana Studies, Northeastern University) will discuss Bynum's new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), which tells the stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. Bynum, a 2021 recipient of the Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop...

Is misogyny part of Islam? In the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad took pains to address both male Muslims and female Muslims, because both have the same religious duties. The Five Pillars of Islam apply to both of them. The Quran states explicitly that men and women are equal before God. During the seventh century, women could own businesses and fight battles. Muslim feminists throughout the world today are advocating a return to Prophet Muhammad’s vision of an egalitarian religion for an equal...

The Department of Dance is pleased to welcome artist Kayla Hamilton for a week of movement and dialogue. Kayla is a performance maker, dancer, educator, cultural consultant, and the artistic director of K. Hamilton Projects. A 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, her past performance work has been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD).  Kayla has developed ‘Crip Movement Lab’—a...

Prof. Miriam Gilbert will explore the relationship between Verdi's opera and its Shakespearean sources. Free and open to the public. The talk will also be available on zoom: https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/9153651333 Sponsored by the Opera Studies Forum and the Obermann Center.

This three-week screening and discussion series celebrates the pioneering work of Black women filmmakers from the 1970s to the present. Drawing inspiration from the first-ever Black women’s film festival, the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, the series features rare and recently restored works from groundbreaking directors including Maya Angelou, Michelle Parkerson, Ayoka Chenzira, Kathleen Collins, Monica Freeman, and Zeinabu irene Davis, among others. The majority of the screenings...

Come to FilmScene for a literary-themed selection of short films by and about poets. The evening will include Maya Angelou's directorial debut, Cheryl Fabio's cinematic portrait of her mother, the poet/performer/musician Sarah Webster Fabio, and Michelle Parkerson's recent documentary about the Enikalley Coffeehouse, a key space for Black LGBTQ artmaking and activism in 1980s Washington, D.C. Cheryl Fabio and Michelle Parkerson will join us by Zoom for a post-screening conversation moderated by...

This special program, part of OUT OF THE ARCHIVE: BLACK WOMEN BEHIND THE LENS, will feature two films by Zeinabu irene Davis. Davis's Compensation (1999), her debut feature film, presents two unique African-American love stories between a Deaf woman and a hearing man. Inspired by a poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, this moving narrative shares their struggle to overcome racism, disability and discrimination. An important film on African-American Deaf culture, Davis incorporates silent film...

Please join us for our last event with some of the most influential artists today, “the Hernandez Bros,” together with Natalia Hernandez and scholars Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina) and Darieck Scott (UC Berkeley). We will enjoy our guests’ presentations at the Iowa City Public Library as well as a variety of events. On Friday, we will play the Love and Rockets: The Great American Comic Book at Filmscene, a documentary that celebrates 40 years of the artists’ career. This is part of...

Bio: Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2020-2022, she was a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax, Canada, where she founded the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. She also...

Please join Jelani Cobb, author and Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, for his lecture "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today." All University lectures are free and open to the public.  This lecture is sponsored by the following University of Iowa Departments and Programs: African American Studies, American Studies, Cinematic Arts, CLAS Dean's Office, Communication Studies, History, Magid center for Writing, English, Obermann Center, and the Provost's Office. 

Our embeddedness within a more-than-human world is one part of what defines us as human. In the 1940s, Iowa-based environmentalist Aldo Leopold offered a land-based ethic: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” We hope to hear papers pursuing questions within and adjacent to the environment, broadly conceived. We are interested in how life is becoming less livable and for whom that is happening...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics. Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details. Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...