Upcoming Events
Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat
Friday, March 13, 2026 5:00pm
Space, time, & collegial support for academic writing
"Rural Community-Centered Research: Maternity Care and Why It Matters" — Keynote lecture (in person and virtual) by Katy Kozhimannil, University of Minnesota
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 7:30am
Special Preliminary Event for the Obermann Symposium "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research."
This lecture, co-sponsored by the UI Carver College of Medicine, is designed for a non-clinical audience and will be open to the public. Katy B. Kozhimannil is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Co-Director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center and the University of Minnesota Rural Health Program.
The lecture will take place in Pediatric...
Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium
Thursday, March 26 to Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)
Directed by Brian R. Farrell, Daria Fisher Page, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges...
"Reimagining the Rural from Idyll to Hinterland: Exhausting Rural Childhoods” — keynote lecture by Esther Pereen, University of Amsterdam
Thursday, March 26, 2026 6:00pm to 7:00pm
This is a keynote lecture for the 2025-2026 Obermann Symposium: "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research."
Esther Pereen, University of Amsterdam: "Reimagining the Rural from Idyll to Hinterland: Exhausting Rural Childhoods”
Across the social and cultural realms, the rural is often imagined through idyllic and pastoral genres that allow it to be conceived as a refuge from globalization. Pereen's European Research Council–funded project RURAL IMAGINATIONS, concentrating on...
Spacer
Upcoming Application Deadlines
Upcoming Application Deadlines
News
Beyond “Not Urban”: Andy Mink on Serving Rural Communities
As part of the 2025–2026 Obermann Symposium, Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research (March 26–27), we’re excited to welcome Andy Mink, founding director of the Smithsonian’s Rural Initiative. In his keynote “More than ‘Not Urban’: Serving Rural Communities as Places and as People” on March 27, he'll explore how the Smithsonian is redefining itself as more than a destination in Washington, D.C., becoming a public service accessible to rural communities nationwide through collaborative, community-sourced partnerships that respond to local priorities and challenges.
In advance of his visit, Obermann Program Coordinator Maria Torres Melgares spoke with Andy about his work and the ideas he’ll bring to the symposium.
Seeking Humanities/Arts PhD Student for Program Coordinator Position, '26-'27
The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies seeks an advanced (ABD) humanities or arts PhD student to work with Obermann staff to support programs and events and tell the stories of the exciting research projects and initiatives supported by the Center during the 2026–2027 school year.
Six paid summer internships available to humanities grad students through new grant
As a graduate student in film and media, internships were a formative experience for Lauren Burrell Cox, associate director at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. They helped her define her values and identify meaningful professional roles where her skills could be put to use across the humanities ecosystem. Now, she’s received a grant from Humanities Without Walls (HWW) to provide six paid internship opportunities with local nonprofits for UI humanities graduate students this summer.
“My goal is to make sure that humanities graduate students are equipped with robust, transferrable skills and access to pathways that lead to secure and fulfilling work,” says Cox.
The three selected nonprofits have hosted successful internships and externships in the past, through the Obermann Center’s Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good initiative and the Obermann Humanities Without Walls Faculty Externship. Each site will host two HWW interns this June and July.
The Texture of Memory: Pervin Saket's Project to Preserve Parsi Heritage
Imagine a small boat on large, dark sea. Imagine families of refugees, with small children and smaller bundles of belongings. Imagine them braving storms and starvation and shipwreck. It sounds like something from yesterday’s news report, but this historical exodus took place between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, when Arab Muslims conquered the once-expansive Persian Zoroastrian empire. Faced with religious persecution, groups of Zoroastrians escaped in boats and landed on the shores of Gujarat in India.
Pervin Saket’s project as an Obermann International Fellow focuses on this community, her community, in modern-day India. Zoroastrianism, the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, is now practiced by only a handful of people, and that too is threatened by extinction. Saket says, “In the version I learned on my grandmother’s lap, the Parsis (literally “people of Pars or Persia”) were taken to the local king when they washed up on the shores of Gujarat. Suspicious of the foreigners, he showed them a bowl of milk filled to the brim, to indicate his land was full. The Parsi leader responded by sprinkling a few grains of sugar on the milk. I suspect that the king had a fondness for good metaphors."
Allies in Healing: Katy Schroeder and the Human-Animal Interactions for Wellbeing Collaborative
The first time Katy Schroeder truly understood the positive impact of connecting people with animals in therapy, she wasn’t sitting in a lab or behind a desk. She was standing beside a horse. “I realized how passionate I was about integrating human-horse interactions into mental health treatment,” she recalls. “It was such a powerful realization.”
At the time, Schroeder was living in Bend, Oregon, and pursuing her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. The idea of incorporating animals into therapy wasn’t new — but it also wasn’t widely studied or regulated. Still, something about it clicked. It lit a path she hadn’t seen before. “I caught the research bug,” she says. Encouraged by a mentor, Schroeder stayed on to earn her doctorate at Oregon State University, where she discovered her second calling: teaching. “That’s really when everything started to come together for me.”
That clarity eventually led her to the University of Iowa, where she now serves as an associate professor in the College of Education's Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program in the Department of Counselor Education. There, she’s quietly reshaping how students — and the field—understand the relationship between humans and animals in mental health care.
From the Hank Lab to the Streets of Romania: A Conversation with Patricia Marga
In a nation confronting one of the highest rates of traffic accidents in Europe, the simple act of crossing the street is a critical public health challenge. This issue is the driving force behind the work of Patricia Marga, a PhD student in public health from Romania. She's on a mission to tackle this crisis by exploring how virtual reality can be harnessed to study and improve pedestrian safety for the most vulnerable: elderly citizens crossing busy city streets and children navigating crowded school zones. Her pursuit of research methods on injury prevention brought her to the University of Iowa this fall as an Obermann International Fellow.
