Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

On September 26, 2024, International Programs hosted a webinar focused on international faculty success in international scholarship and creative work as a part of the Cultivating Success: A Global Faculty Initiative series. Obermann Center director Luis Martín-Estudillo joined a distinguished panel of UI faculty experts to offer valuable insights into navigating the complexities of academia as an international faculty member at Iowa.

This October, the Obermann Center is thrilled to present the inaugural event in our new annual public conversation series, Counterpoint. These events will highlight a University of Iowa scholar with a long career of making critical contributions to their field, placing them in dialogue across the disciplines with another scholar from a different yet complementary field. 

Three months ago, I stepped into the Obermann Center’s library for the first time. My task was simple, if sizeable: I needed to organize the ~600 volumes in the collection by the end of the summer. As a student in Iowa’s School of Library & Information Science, I was excited for my first solo library project. I’ve been interested in academic librarianship, scholarly communications, and research support for a long time. However, I knew I would have to approach the work strategically and manage my time well in order to succeed. Our goal was to transform the library into a showcase for the works of Obermann scholars. But we also own many books that are unrelated to Obermann, and all of our books were intermingled without regard for subject, date, or author. After about thirty minutes of pacing up and down the library on my first day, I decided I was going to take every book off the shelf.

During their Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant (IDRG) in summer 2024, screenwriter Dean Bakopoulos (Cinematic Arts) and drama scholar Jennifer Buckley (English & Theatre Arts) wrote the pilot for a new historical TV miniseries: Anton & Olga. The show, which Bakopoulos and Buckley plan to pitch to producers early next year, follows revolutionary playwright Anton Chekhov, actress Olga Knipper, and their colleagues at the newly-established Moscow Arts Theater (MAT) through personal, political, and artistic upheaval at the end of the nineteenth century. By exploring the creative clashes and collaborations that fueled Chekhov and the MAT, Bakopoulos and Buckley aim to reintroduce modern audiences to an important part of theatrical history. “So many of our ideas of what counts as ‘good acting’ come from them [the MAT],” explains Buckley, “especially from their co-founder, Konstantin Stanislavski, whose ‘system’ still gets taught today in acting programs. Our demands for nuance, subtlety, and emotional truth are all founded on their work.”

For seven years, the Obermann Center at the University of Iowa has been a partner in the Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls consortium led by Professor Antoinette Burton at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Graduate students from Iowa have attended HWW’s Career Diversity Summer Workshops, and several faculty members have worked with cross-institutional Grand Research Challenge teams. This year, we are delighted that Assistant Professor Louise Seamster (Departments of Sociology & Criminology and African American Studies) was selected as the P.I. of a team focused on "The Flint Water Disaster Public Archive." The “Flint Water Disaster Public Archive” will re-home public data that has been largely inaccessible to Flint communities — a form of data justice that is of urgent relevance to the history, present, and future of those communities. The project is a collaboration among the University of Iowa, University of Michigan–Flint and the Flint Democracy Defense League.

In 2010, Professor Teresa Mangum picked up a paintbrush alongside administrator and compatriot Neda Hatami. The two began transforming the Tudor-style house at 111 Church Street into what is now the University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. It wasn’t just a fresh coat of paint. From the start of her fourteen-year tenure as director of the Obermann Center—which falls under the auspices of the Office of the Vice President of Research and is located across from the UI President’s residence—Teresa has been building a legacy. “My favorite thing is watching how people enter the space,” she remarks, speaking about the Center with a mixture of Midwestern lucidity and Southern warmth. “People walk in and you can see them thinking, This is what I thought it would be like to be at a university. The image of people’s faces when they walk in is one of my guiding lights. How do we keep the hope for an intellectual life alive?”

Luis Martín-Estudillo, professor and collegiate scholar in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will serve as the next director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (OCAS). His appointment will begin July 1. “We are very excited that Professor Martín-Estudillo has agreed to lead the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies into its next chapter,” said Kristy Nabhan-Warren, associate vice president for research. “He brings a wealth of international connections, fresh ideas, and a proven track record of collaboration across units and disciplines here at Iowa and beyond. The search committee was deeply impressed with his vision for the center, and the campus feedback we solicited confirmed and amplified our excitement for new possibilities for OCAS.” For more than four decades, the OCAS has served as an interdisciplinary hub for artists, scholars, and researchers who bridge campus with the larger world.

This spring, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies hosts the Interdisciplinary, Experiential Environmental Education and Research series, which invites campus artists, humanities scholars, and researchers in the sciences and social sciences to imagine the many ways that our campus and connected spaces might serve as a living laboratory for environmental research. The series, co-sponsored by the Office of the Vice President for Research, includes visits from facilities and research leaders at other campuses who have developed transformative, place-based research collaborations that include students, staff, and faculty. Kathleen Socolofsky, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Director of the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, will present "The UCD Arboretum and Public Garden as Interdisciplinary, Learning Laboratory—Connecting the Campus and Community Through Experiential Teaching, Learning, and Research on and in the Environment" on Friday, April 5, alongside Bethany Wiggin, professor and Founding Director of the Program in Environmental Humanities and the My Climate Story and Ecotopian Toolkit projects at the University of Pennsylvania, who will present ""Humanists at Work in the World: Campus-Community Partnerships for Environmental Justice."

In November 2023, Damani Phillips (School of Music and African American Studies, CLAS) and spoken-word artist Brandon Alexander Williams released the world's first "listening book," Read and Blew Notes. A new medium intended to replace physical music products like CDs and download cards, the "L.B." brings back the ritual experience of listening to new music with a physical product in hand. The book includes album liner notes, full musical scores, and interviews with artists on how their music came into being. The Obermann Center was proud to support the project through co-sponsorship funding.

Who’s your local gravedigger? Do you know? Do you have one? The residents of Cherryfield, Maine, do—and it’s not the dirty, shadow-clad figure you’re picturing. It’s local resident Everard Hall, smiling and ball-capped in a plaid work shirt. There’s a harmonica in his pocket and dancing boots in his pickup. Everard (pronounced “EVer-ard”) is one of the few remaining gravediggers in the U.S. who dig by hand—and he does it year-round across northeastern Maine. Using picks, shovels, chains, and winches to haul out rocks, ice, hardpan, roots, clay, and sand, he insists on doing the job with care and precision. It’s not surprising that UI photography professor Thalassa Raasch feels the exact same way about documenting Everard’s work. Her in-progress collection of photos and essays, In Over My Head, documents the unexpected beauty of Everard’s work as a gravedigger and explores the profound thresholds between solitude and community, life and death.