News & Events

Upcoming Events

Book Ends Information Session (virtual)

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 8:30am to 9:00am

Virtual

Book Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist faculty members in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books. Read more about the program.

Interested applicants are invited to learn more about the program and application process at a virtual information session on Tuesday, February 3, at 8:30 a.m. Obermann Center Director Luis Martín-Estudillo...

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Wednesday, February 25, 2026 8:30am to 4:30pm

Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete tips and operational strategies that support planning and longer-term sustainability.

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

The Research Development Office is hosting an in person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and...

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium

Thursday, March 26 to Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)

Iowa City Public Library

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...

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium

Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)

Iowa City Public Library

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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Spring 2026 Obermann Writing Collective

Friday, January 23, 2026 5:00pm

111 Church Street

This program offers accountability to artists, scholars, and researchers working on any kind of writing project (articles, essays, fellowship or grant applications, dissertations, book projects, edited volumes, etc.) who want dedicated time, a cozy space, and a community for the practice of writing.

In spring 2026, four writing groups will meet in our Writers' Attic at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at 111 Church St. Each group will meet once a week for 1.5 hours, beginning the week of...

Nomination Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award

Monday, February 2, 2026 5:00pm

111 Church Street

The new Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award recognizes individuals or teams whose trajectories have engaged diverse disciplines to produce insights that would be unattainable within a single academic silo. These scholars cultivate collaborative work, fostering dialogue across academic fields and institutional units. Their research or creative work engages with foundational questions that resonate across society. By recognizing interdisciplinary excellence, the Obermann Center for...

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2026)

Saturday, February 14, 2026 (all day)

111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Fall 2026 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists with...

Spring Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 5:00pm

111 Church Street

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends—Obermann Book Completion Workshop supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist faculty members in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Friday, May 8, 2026 5:00pm

111 Church Street

This new Obermann Center program offers modest yet swift support for those portions of research and creative endeavors by UI scholars that are important toward advancing a project but do not have enough funding from other sources. We will grant ten awards of $500 or less per academic year. Note that funds need to be spent by June 30 of each year.

Eligibility: Open to all University of Iowa faculty and staff researchers

Graduate students: Note that the Graduate College offers Small Grants for the...

News

A press pass with a man's face, dated 1986.

HPG Intern Brings Brokaw Press Passes to Life

Jennifer New

In 2016, journalist Tom Brokaw donated his papers to The University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The collection includes notes and drafts for several of Brokaw's books (including from his best-known work, The Greatest Generation), letters from heads of states and other media figures, photographs, awards, and appointment calendars. Librarian Liz Riordan spent hours untangling the press passes that arrived in an old Pan-Am bag. Amongst the many boxes of papers was a worn blue Pan-Am bag that had a handwritten note on its side: “Trove of press passes.”

Beyond Times New Roman: Daria Fisher Page makes the case for visual advocacy in law school

Jennifer New

In the U.S., where the terms "lawyer" and "attorney" refer to a legal professional, it can be easy to forget that "advocate" is the term more widely recognized across cultures. The word comes from Roman law and the Latin "advocatus," “one called to aid (another); a pleader (on one’s behalf).” The training of advocates also goes back to the Roman Republic, when it was deemed useful to have people outside the priesthood trained in rhetoric and reasoning. To this day, law students receive extensive training in oral and written advocacy. During three intensive years, they are taught how to make clear and concise arguments in both formats. But what about communication through images? Daria Fisher Page, a professor in the UI College of Law and a Fall 2021 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, believes that today’s legal professionals also need training in visual advocacy.

Searching for Red with Margaret Beck

Jenna Hammerich

An anthropological archaeologist, Margaret Beck is continually searching—sometimes physically, for artifacts or geological samples, but always intellectually—to understand how people once lived, how they prepared and served food, taught and learned craftwork, used local resources, moved within their landscapes, and spread their traditions. Currently, she’s studying red-painted archeological ceramics and iron-rich geological samples to discover how Native peoples created and applied the color red in the central United States. The answers aren't always easy to find centuries later. "Throughout Native North America," says Beck, Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Fall 2021 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, "red is a powerful, strong, and often sacred color.” Indigenous people in the Midwest and Great Plains used red paint for daily grooming, to ornament household objects, and to make the mundane sacred in religious ceremonies. When Beck moved to Iowa in 2007 and began looking at archeological ceramics from Iowa and Illinois, she noticed that their red pigments differed from those found in archeological sites elsewhere in North America. The red coatings (paints or slips) were often thinner and more powdery, with lighter or more yellow shades of red. Beck surmised that these differences were due to regionally distinct raw materials and pigment application techniques—but this was something she’d have to find out for herself. "In the Great Plains and the American Bottom, I found that this was an overlooked subject," she says. "Scholars know relatively little about sources of red pigment or ochre there"—in contrast to, say, chippable stone, the location of which has been widely studied in the region.

Hannah Baysinger Discovers “Next”

Jennifer New

Hannah Baysinger had forty-eight hours to leave Paraguay. She had been in the South American country as a Peace Corps volunteer for just six months when the pandemic forced her and other volunteers to leave at the end of March 2020. “I was on the last commercial flight out of Paraguay, and one of the last out of South America,” says Baysinger of the sudden departure she made from a place she intended to call home for two years.

Three people sitting in a grassy area with trees behind them.

Planting Hope: The Anne Frank Tree Arrives in Iowa

Jennifer New

On February 23, 1944, a 15-year-old girl gazed from an attic window at the topmost branches of a tree. The tree had become a sort of friend to her, a reminder of life beyond the small space to which she was confined and one of the few things she could see from the only window that was not blacked out. In her diary that day, she wrote, “I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists…and I may live to see it, this sunshine, these cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy.” Those words represent the hope that has made their author, Anne Frank, one of the major figures of World War II and a ubiquitous symbol of optimism in the face of unthinkable darkness. On April 29, 2022, the thirteenth Anne Frank Tree will be planted on the northeast corner of the University of Iowa’s Pentacrest. Its arrival is due to the work of Frank scholar and UI German Department faculty member Dr. Kirsten Kumpf Baele. Her proposal to bring a tree to Iowa City was accepted a year and a half ago by the Anne Frank Center USA; however, the pandemic postponed the original planting ceremony, which is now slated for April 29, 2022.

Bethanny Sudibyo Wins 2021 Humanities 3MT

Bethanny Sudibyo (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS) won the 2021 Obermann Humanities 3MT for her presentation “Imperial Imaginings: Representations of Religion, Race, and Gender in 19th-Century Spanish Philippine Novels.” Sudibyo's win earned her a place in the campus-wide 3MT finals, the winner of which will be announced on November 12.

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Recent Events

Journal Publishing Now: A Conversation with Jennifer Bean, Lauren Cramer, and Patricia White

Tuesday, April 23, 2024 12:30pm to 2:00pm

Virtual

Please join us for a panel conversation about academic publishing with three esteemed editors of interdisciplinary journals: Jennifer Bean (University of Washington; Feminist Media Histories), Lauren Cramer (University of Toronto; liquid blackness), and Patricia White (Swarthmore College; Camera Obscura). The panelists will discuss the nuts-and-bolts of journal publishing (for would-be contributors as well as would-be editors), and they will also each reflect on key directions in the fields of...

Public Lecture: “Made to be Seen: Kongo Graphic Writing as a Basis for Rethinking the Transmission of Knowledge” - Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, Visiting Scholar, School of Art and Art History

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 5:30pm

Art Building West

Visiting Scholar Professor Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz will be giving a public lecture titled “Made to be Seen: Kongo Graphic Writing as a Basis for Rethinking the Transmission of Knowledge.”

Professor Martínez-Ruiz is the Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art History in Honor of Roy Sieber at the Department of Art History at Indiana University. He is also Senior Research Associate in African Art and Its Diaspora at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town...

Joseph Graves. A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Discusses How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Some of Our Biggest Problems

Saturday, April 13, 2024 10:45am to 11:30am

Phillips Hall

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is a professor of biological science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and former associate dean for research at the Joint School for Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. His research focuses on the genomics of adaptation and evolutionary theories of aging. He has also written two books that address myths of race in the U.S. and is frequently interviewed for articles, podcasts, and documentaries on this topic.

2024 Iowa City Darwin Day

Saturday, April 13, 2024 10:00am to 12:30pm

Phillips Hall

Every year to mark Charles Darwin’s birthday, Iowa City Darwin Day organizes a two-day celebration of science designed to promote scientific literacy and increase public awareness of the contributions of science to society. The featured speakers for the 2024 events on April 12 and 13 are Joseph Graves Jr., Harmit Malik and Heather Sander. All talks are free and open to all.

Joseph Graves Jr. is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at North Carolina Agricultural...

Harmit Malik: Rules of Engagement: Molecular Arms Races Between Primate and Viral Genomes

Friday, April 12, 2024 4:30pm to 5:30pm

Biology Building East

Harmit Malik is a biologist, a member of the USA National Academy of Sciences, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. His research focuses on genetic conflict and has direct implications for understanding human disease. Dr. Malik will also give a talk for the public, “Paleovirology: Ghosts and Gifts of Ancient Viruses,” on Saturday, April 13.

This talk is part of Iowa City Darwin Day Science Fest, a two-day celebration of science designed to promote scientific literacy and increase public...

Joseph Graves: Race, Health, and the Built Microbiome

Friday, April 12, 2024 3:30pm to 4:30pm

Biology Building East

Joseph Graves Jr. is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Dr. Graves’ research focuses on the evolution of adaptation and evolutionary theories of aging. He has risen to international prominence as the author of two books that address myths of race in American society, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend That Race Exists in America. ...

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