Upcoming Events

Kayla Hamilton Artist Talk promotional image

Kayla Hamilton Artist Talk

Thursday, March 23, 2023 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Public Space One
Co-sponsored by the Department of Dance, Obermann Center, and Public Space One.
Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award promotional image

Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award

Thursday, March 30 to Saturday, April 1, 2023 (all day)
2022-23 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora From March 30 to April 1, "Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora" will feature filmmakers, translators, and film scholars from the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. Organized by Christopher Harris (Cinematic Arts) with partnership from Cristiane Lira (University of Georgia) and Brazilian filmmaker Janaína Oliveira, the...
Frequências Keynote Lecture by Janaína Oliveira promotional image

Frequências Keynote Lecture by Janaína Oliveira

Thursday, March 30, 2023 3:15pm to 4:15pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)
This is a keynote Lecture by Janaína Oliveira, Federal Instituto of Rio de Janeiro. Introduction by Christopher Harris.  
Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: Screenings of República and Dazed Flesh promotional image

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: Screenings of República and Dazed Flesh

Thursday, March 30, 2023 4:15pm to 5:45pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)
This event is part of the 2023 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora brings together filmmakers, artists, scholars, and critics from across the globe in order to inaugurate a practice of collective attunement. How can we best attune ourselves to the waves set in motion by this new cinema? How does Brazil’s current...
Frequências: Screenings of República and Vaga Carne [Dazed Flesh] by Grace Passô promotional image

Frequências: Screenings of República and Vaga Carne [Dazed Flesh] by Grace Passô

Thursday, March 30, 2023 4:15pm to 5:45pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)
FilmScene at the Chauncey will host film screenings of Grace Passô's República and Vaga Carne [Dazed Flesh]. After the screenings, there will be a conversation with filmmaker Janaína Oliveira.
Verdi's Falstaff and Shakespeare's: An introduction to the Metropolitan Opera performance. Lecture by Miriam Gilbert promotional image

Verdi's Falstaff and Shakespeare's: An introduction to the Metropolitan Opera performance. Lecture by Miriam Gilbert

Thursday, March 30, 2023 5:30pm to 6:30pm
University Capitol Centre
Introduction to the Met Opera streaming of Verdi's "Falstaff" on Sat., April 1
Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award promotional image

Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award

Friday, March 31 to Saturday, April 1, 2023 (all day)
2022-23 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora From March 30 to April 1, "Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora" will feature filmmakers, translators, and film scholars from the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. Organized by Christopher Harris (Cinematic Arts) with partnership from Cristiane Lira (University of Georgia) and Brazilian filmmaker Janaína Oliveira, the...
Crosscurrents in Time: A Video Trilogy by Aline Motta (Exhibition) promotional image

Crosscurrents in Time: A Video Trilogy by Aline Motta (Exhibition)

Friday, March 31, 10:00am to Tuesday, August 1, 2023 4:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art
This multi-channel installation of three related videos will be on view in the Lauridsen Family Gallery at the Stanley Museum of Art. Aline Motta is a participant in  Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora, an Oberman Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Project Award, held at the University of Iowa March 30 - April 1, 2023. Among the Atlantic waters that connect Brazil, Portugal, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, contemporary artist Aline Motta engages...
Frequências: Interventions by Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Grace Passô, and Michael B. Gillespie promotional image

Frequências: Interventions by Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Grace Passô, and Michael B. Gillespie

Friday, March 31, 2023 10:30am to 11:45am
Stanley Museum of Art
This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. Tatiana Carvalho Costa is a curator and teacher. She is a doctoral student at the Federal University of Minas Gerais where she researches Afro-Brazilian epistemologies and Black Brazilian Cinema, in particular the recent production of short films. She works as programmer and juror of festivals and recently joined the curatorial team of the Mostra de Cinema de...
 Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: Artist Talk by Aline Motta — "Bridges over the Abyss" promotional image

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: Artist Talk by Aline Motta — "Bridges over the Abyss"

Friday, March 31, 2023 1:15pm to 2:45pm
Stanley Museum of Art
This event is part of the 2023 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award:. Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. Following the opening of Brazilian visual artist Aline Motta’s exhibition at the Stanley Museum, the artist Aline Motta and Brazilian curator and scholar Tatiana Carvalho Costa will share their thoughts on the works exhibited and discuss the uses of speculative fiction and archive to piece together a possible family...
Frequências: Interventions by Cristiane Lira, Miryam Charles, and Aline Motta promotional image

Frequências: Interventions by Cristiane Lira, Miryam Charles, and Aline Motta

Friday, March 31, 2023 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Stanley Museum of Art
This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. With her artistic practice, Aline Motta (b. 1974, Niterói, Brazil) seeks to point out and fill in the gaps in her own family history as a result of colonial erasure. Her videos, photographs, installations, and performances are based on speculative studies that mix archival research, field trips, and oral history reports that she uses to access, nourish, and reveal...
Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: "Black Utopia LP" Performance by Cauleen Smith promotional image

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: "Black Utopia LP" Performance by Cauleen Smith

Friday, March 31, 2023 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art
This event is part of the 2023 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. Join us for Cauleen Smith's captivating audio-visual performance, Black Utopia LP. Combining 35mm slide projection with the artist's vinyl LP, this 90-minute "film without film" offers a unique cinematic experience. Emerging from Smith's extensive research on Afrofuturism, this live work ruminates on history, music...
Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award promotional image

Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award

Saturday, April 1, 2023 (all day)
2022-23 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora From March 30 to April 1, "Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora" will feature filmmakers, translators, and film scholars from the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. Organized by Christopher Harris (Cinematic Arts) with partnership from Cristiane Lira (University of Georgia) and Brazilian filmmaker Janaína Oliveira, the...
Frequências Screening: Director’s Choice programmed by Christopher Harris promotional image

Frequências Screening: Director’s Choice programmed by Christopher Harris

Saturday, April 1, 2023 10:15am to 12:00pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)
This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of...
Frequências: Interventions by Janaína Oliveira, Yasmina Price, and Cauleen Smith promotional image

Frequências: Interventions by Janaína Oliveira, Yasmina Price, and Cauleen Smith

Saturday, April 1, 2023 1:00pm to 2:15pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)
This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora. Yasmina Price's Intervention will be a hybrid of lecture/meditation and presentations of film and sound where she will expand on her conversation with filmmaker Miryam Charles. Through video clips from Charles’s short films, Price will reflect on the inerrancy of Caribbean cinema and the silencing of Haiti in film (and otherwise). How, her intervention asks, might...
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Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2023–24) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2023–24)

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 5:00pm
Obermann Center Working Groups provide space, structure, and discretionary funding for groups led by faculty that may include advanced graduate students, staff members, and community members with a shared intellectual interest. Groups have used this opportunity to explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals.  This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a moment when cross...
Application Deadline: Obermann Fellows-in-Residence (Fall 2023) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Fellows-in-Residence (Fall 2023)

Tuesday, May 2, 2023 5:00pm
Obermann Center Fellows-in-Residence fully devote themselves to projects within an interdisciplinary community. The program supports artists, researchers, and scholars during periods when focus and feedback are crucial. The program is rooted in our mission: to support the work of individual scholars, while also providing Fellows with the opportunity to enrich an individual, discipline-specific project through interdisciplinary exchanges with a lively intellectual community of Fellows. Each year...

Past Events

University of Iowa Lecture Committee: Jelani Cobb - "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today" promotional image
University of Iowa Lecture Committee: Jelani Cobb - "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today"
Wednesday, March 22, 2023 7:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)
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. 
Application Deadline: Humanities for the Public Good Summer '23 Internships promotional image
Application Deadline: Humanities for the Public Good Summer '23 Internships
Thursday, March 9, 2023 5:00pm
Experiential learning is a cornerstone of the Humanities for the Public Good PhD as we create a program centered around the applied humanities. Eight internships are available for summer 2023 for UI PhD students in the humanities or humanities-adjacent disciplines. Interns will spend two summer months working with and for a campus or community partner on a specific project or area of focus. In addition to their work on site, interns also attend weekly cohort meetings and complete assignments...
Islam Feminism and Women's Rights
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 8:00pm to 9:00pm
Virtual
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.
Letter of Inquiry Deadline: HPG Humanities Labs, Summer 2023 promotional image
Letter of Inquiry Deadline: HPG Humanities Labs, Summer 2023
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 5:00pm
The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) Initiative invites applications from UI faculty and partners to design a Humanities Lab. We define a “Lab” as an applied, experiential approach to teaching and learning at the graduate level that offers graduate students meaningful ways to connect advanced studies in the humanities with both a social challenge and skills valued in multiple career settings. The Lab grant will be awarded to one or more faculty members from humanities or humanities...
Application Deadline: Summer 2023 Obermann Center Writing & Research Workshop promotional image
Application Deadline: Summer 2023 Obermann Center Writing & Research Workshop
Tuesday, March 7, 2023 5:00pm
111 Church Street
With generous financial support from the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Obermann Center will offer the Obermann Center Writing & Research Workshop June 12 to 16, 2023. Faculty writing about their research across all disciplines and ranks are invited to apply. At this weeklong event, participants will have the opportunity to begin summer by deeply engaging a work-in-progress with the support of individualized feedback, workshops, and time to write in solitude and in community at...
Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America — A Discussion with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner promotional image
Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America — A Discussion with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner
Thursday, March 2, 2023 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Virtual
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...

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