Upcoming Events

AI Is Not Your Friend: Cautions and Vents about Its Uses and Abuses in the Creation of Scholarly Publications — public lecture by Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

AI Is Not Your Friend: Cautions and Vents about Its Uses and Abuses in the Creation of Scholarly Publications — public lecture by Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Tuesday, October 6, 2026 3:00pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

On Tuesday, Oct. 6, from 3–4 p.m. at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press—will offer his perspective as both a longtime acquiring editor and as a writer on how the advent of AI affects the present and possible futures of scholarly publishing. In particular, he will discuss how the emerging technology creates concerns and unresolved tensions—ethical, legal, and otherwise—in publishing around intellectual property, peer...

Holding Space: Stories of Interdisciplinary Collaboration — Counterpoint event featuring Stephanie Miracle promotional image

Holding Space: Stories of Interdisciplinary Collaboration — Counterpoint event featuring Stephanie Miracle

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 5:00pm to 5:15pm
Voxman Music Building

Join us to celebrate the interdisciplinary work of University of Iowa choreographer and assistant professor of dance Stephanie Miracle, recipient of the 2026 Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award.

Miracle will bring together dance, engineering, and the humanities in a new choreographed work featuring dancers performing alongside robots built by the University of Iowa College of Engineering, with narration by Eric Gidal.

A conversation among Miracle, Gidal, and engineering collaborator Deema...

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

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

Wednesday, January 13, 2027 1:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

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 Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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

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

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

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 Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 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...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books 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 UI faculty members of all ranks and with significant research responsibilities to turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour virtual workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants promotional image

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Thursday, April 1, 2027 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 10 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 who have not received a SIP award in the past academic year.

Application...

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2027–30) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2027–30)

Wednesday, April 7, 2027 5:00pm
111 Church Street

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 share their work in progress or draw up a set of readings they want to undertake and discuss. Others have organized conferences, applied for grants together, written articles together, designed new courses, taken field trips, organized...

News

Pandemic Practices: Lessons Learned (and Worth Keeping)

Even as many of us long for a return to an in-person, on-site work life, we’ve also been learning valuable new practices—for teaching, for meetings, for collaboration, and more. Over the past few months, the Obermann Center has been collecting Pandemic Practices to share, practices we want to remember and refine. The following is a list of practices submitted via our webform and/or discussed at...

Spring 2021 Invite-a-Guest-to-Class Mini-Grant Recipients, Visitors

We received such enthusiastic reports from our Fall 2020 Invite-a-Guest-to-Class mini-grant recipients that we reprised the program this spring, extending eligibility to UI teaching assistants as well as faculty. We're delighted to award a new slate of mini-grants to support 38 virtual course visits by a diverse and impressive array of educators, researchers, artists, administrators, and activists...

Wise and Valiant: Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez celebrates forgotten women authors

While completing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, Martín López-Vega took a course on the Golden age of Spanish theater. When the class read Valor, agravio y mujer by Ana Caro, López-Vega was shocked. Though he was a native of Spain and had studied literature at the University of Spain, he’d never before heard of Caro. The course, which led him to discover the names and...
Jason Rantanen

Patent Warrior: Jason Rantanen's projects seek to help patents serve people

Early last fall, the Federal Circuit rejected a request from Google to move a patent infringement case involving Google’s YouTube service out of East Texas. The request, formally known as a writ of mandamus, is an attempt at judicial remedy by petitioning an appellate court. In this instance, Google was claiming that East Texas wasn’t the proper venue for the lawsuit. There has been an uptick in...

Black Lives on Screen: Cinematic Arts Offers Semester-Long Series

This spring semester, the Department of Cinematic Arts is hosting an online screening series, Black Lives on Screen, featuring the work of a diverse range of acclaimed African American and Black filmmakers, artists, and scholars. Intended to promote and celebrate the rich history and future of Black cinematic expression, the events will give UI classes, as well as individual students, staff, and...

Cultural Postmortem 2020

How can artists and scholars help the nation contend with the peril in which we find ourselves—starting with our own campuses? The 2020 US presidential race was one of the most politically and ideologically divisive and contentious races that we’ve ever seen. As the events of January 6, 2021 have illustrated, the nation remains divided: political leaders at the highest level are challenging...

New Voices, Refreshing Perspectives: Invite-a-Guest-to-Class Mini Grants

Are you teaching an undergraduate or graduate course that features work by an expert outside the University of Iowa? Do you have a colleague from another institution who could bring a thought-provoking cross-disciplinary perspective to an issue you’re addressing in your course? If you would like to invite a practitioner or expert from the public sector to speak in a course you are teaching this...

Meet the Podcasters! Three UI faculty-podcasters pull back the curtain on their process

Imagine a world without recorded sound. From film soundtracks to car alarms, many of us are so steeped in sound at every moment that we would instantly notice its absence. Since the inception of radio in 1895, we have steadily increased the technology and tools for making and sharing sound. Each step has made it easier and less costly for a person with a microphone and some equipment to capture...
Rhondda Robinson Thomas

Book Talk with Rhondda Robinson Thomas, author of Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community , Nov. 30

In the summer of 2007, a young scholar named Rhondda Robinson Thomas attended a new faculty orientation at Clemson University. Thomas was unfamiliar with Clemson, which is a public, land-grant research university in South Carolina, and was surprised to learn that the campus was built on the site of American statesman John C. Calhoun and Floride Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation. In fact, their home...
Green, Fair, & Prosperous book cover

Planning Scholar Suggests Iowa Is at a Crossroads, and Proposes a Path Forward

In 1900, Iowa was the tenth largest state in the country. A hundred years later, it was the thirtieth largest and had experienced the biggest decline in its population rank of any state. Today, Iowa is at a crossroads. Its population is more urban, less white, and more environmentally challenged than its longtime reputation suggests. In a new book, Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a...

Recent Events

Heritage Language Education: A Talk by Dr. Julio Torres (UC-Irvine) promotional image

Heritage Language Education: A Talk by Dr. Julio Torres (UC-Irvine)

Friday, April 1, 2022 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Virtual

As part of the Teaching and Learning Heritage Languages Series, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Obermann Center present "Heritage Language Education," a talk by Dr. Julio Torres of UC-Irvine. 

ECO SOMA by Petra Kuppers Reading and Book Release Party promotional image

ECO SOMA by Petra Kuppers Reading and Book Release Party

Thursday, March 31, 2022 6:00pm to 8:45pm
The Tuesday Agency

Please join us in welcoming Petra Kuppers to Iowa City for a reading and discussion about her most recent book Eco Soma: Pain and Joy in Speculative Performance Encounters (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) 

Dear Kitty: The Act of Keeping a Diary promotional image

Dear Kitty: The Act of Keeping a Diary

Wednesday, March 30, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

As we await the arrival of the Anne Frank Tree, which will be planted on the University of Iowa Pentacrest on April 29, 2022, we encourage people of all ages to read the book that is at the heart of this event. Better yet—read it in community!

To provide context to your reading, we’re offering three in-person discussions at the Iowa City Public Library (123 S. Linn St., Iowa City). All of the discussions are free and open to the general public. 

In this second session, Dr. Kirsten Kumpf Baele...

What Do We Mean by Research Now?—The Art(s) of Inquiry and Activism promotional image

What Do We Mean by Research Now?—The Art(s) of Inquiry and Activism

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Virtual

The Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research defines AR as “practice-based, practice-led research in the arts,” often an interdisciplinary creative research that acts as a “driver for critical thinking, creativity, and open innovation.” Many artists understand their art-making to be a means of asking soaring questions; of helping audiences grasp the complexity of wicked problems; of shocking, literally moving, or seducing participants into risking new solutions; on enacting the art of...

Meskwaki Language Revitalization: Our Journey promotional image

Meskwaki Language Revitalization: Our Journey

Tuesday, March 22, 2022 3:00pm to 4:00pm
University of Iowa Pentacrest

Join us for a presentation from the Meskwaki Language Preservation Director Wayne Pushetonequa, "Meskwaki Language Revitalization: Our Journey."

Free and open to all. Reception to follow.

Co-sponsored by the Native American Student Association; the UI Old Capitol Museum; the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies; the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program; and Native American Council.

Amplifying Women's Voices: A Faculty & Guest Artist Recital Featuring the Lanta Horn Duo promotional image

Amplifying Women's Voices: A Faculty & Guest Artist Recital Featuring the Lanta Horn Duo

Thursday, March 10, 2022 7:30pm
Voxman Music Building

This concert will be livestreamed here: https://music.uiowa.edu/about/live-stream-concert-schedule

This recital is titled "Amplifying Women's Voices" and consists of music written by women, primarily in the late-20th and 21st centuries. Women are a significantly underrepresented group in the field of brass instrument performance. Some studies suggest reasons for this inequity stems from lack of role models, and others point to persistent stereotypes about women who play brass. Reports continue...