Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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...

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...

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News

Green, Fair, & Prosperous book cover

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

Jennifer New
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...

Exploring the Echo Chamber: Brian Ekdale PI on $1M Grant to Study Social Media Algorithms & Extremism

Jenna Hammerich
Let's say you want to watch a news clip about Confederate monuments. You search YouTube and choose a video from what appears to be a randomly generated list of results. When the video ends, YouTube autoplays another video and recommends dozens more—and likely they’re the sort of thing you actually might watch, because that list is generated by algorithms that process your YouTube viewing history...
Peggy Schwab

Obermann Spelman Rockefeller Community Scholar Named

Peggy Schwab, a second-year master's candidate in the UI College of Education's School Counseling program and Iowa LEND (Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Related Disabilities), is the 2020-21 Obermann Spelman Rockefeller Community Scholar. For this academic year, Peggy will work with Neighborhood NESTS, a new community collaborative initiative. Nurturing Every Student...

Graduate Students Build Campus-Community Connections, Explore New Careers in Summer Internships

For nine graduate students at the University of Iowa, this was not the summer internship they had anticipated. Unlike summer 2019, this second summer of the Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) internship program came with many unexpected twists and challenges. As the University of Iowa moved to virtual learning, interns joined partner organizations and took on new responsibilities just as many of...

Graduate Students Build Campus-Community Connections, Explore New Careers in Summer Internships

For nine graduate students at the University of Iowa, this was not the summer internship they had anticipated. Unlike summer 2019, this second summer of the Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) internship program came with many unexpected twists and challenges. As the University of Iowa moved to virtual learning, interns joined partner organizations and took on new responsibilities just as many of...
Pandemic, State, and Society logo

Pandemic, State & Society Highlights Voices from Asia

Last winter, as news about a new virus that was first reported in China in December began to dominate headlines, two University of Iowa faculty members began discussing the cultural repercussions and historical echoes of what was happening. Shuang Chen, a professor of history who studies late imperial and modern China, reached out to Cynthia Chou, director of the UI’s Center for Asian and Pacific...

Uneasy Stories: Mary Lou Emery Explores the Paradoxical Cultural History of the Bungalow

Jenna Hammerich
The bungalow has long seemed an ideal home. It's moderate in scale, built with deep porches or verandas that both invite time outdoors and seem to welcome neighborly visits. Even the word “bungalow” conjures up such coziness that a trendy house-sharing app borrowed it for its name. In 20th-century literature and film, however, the bungalow is frequently the site of scandal and violence, which...

HPG Summer 2020 Internship Program: Final Report

In June and July, 2020, nine University of Iowa (UUI) graduate students from the Colleges of Liberal Arts and Education worked with six public-facing organizations as interns. It was the second summer of the Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) internship program, which is one part of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded grant program administered by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.

Mini Grants to Bring Virtual Guest Speakers to Your Class

APPLICATION Are you teaching an undergraduate or graduate course that features work by a colleague outside the University of Iowa? Do you have a colleague from another discipline who could bring a thought-provoking cross-disciplinary perspective to an issue you’re addressing in your course? Or would you like to invite a practitioner or an expert from the public sector whose perspective would...
Laura Perry with dog

Laura Perry Joins Obermann

Laura Perry is joining the Obermann Center staff for the next two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow with the Humanities for the Public Good project. Born in Southern California, Laura recently received her doctoral degree in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin­-Madison. In addition to serving as the managing editor of the digital magazine Edge Effects, she was a project assistant...
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Recent Events

Dissertation Camp promotional image

Dissertation Camp

Thursday, May 30, 2024 9:00am to 1:00pm
Virtual

The 2024 dissertation writing camp runs from Tuesday, May 28 to Friday, June 7. Spaces are limited; priority will be given to doctoral students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed data collection, and are focused on writing. We meet via Zoom from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Mon-Fri). Each day begins with a short group discussion and ends with a 30-minute presentation focused on dissertation writing, but most of the time is devoted to writing. Participants set daily and weekly writing goals and...

Dissertation Camp promotional image

Dissertation Camp

Wednesday, May 29, 2024 9:00am to 1:00pm
Virtual

The 2024 dissertation writing camp runs from Tuesday, May 28 to Friday, June 7. Spaces are limited; priority will be given to doctoral students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed data collection, and are focused on writing. We meet via Zoom from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Mon-Fri). Each day begins with a short group discussion and ends with a 30-minute presentation focused on dissertation writing, but most of the time is devoted to writing. Participants set daily and weekly writing goals and...

Dissertation Camp promotional image

Dissertation Camp

Tuesday, May 28, 2024 9:00am to 1:00pm
Virtual

The 2024 dissertation writing camp runs from Tuesday, May 28 to Friday, June 7. Spaces are limited; priority will be given to doctoral students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed data collection, and are focused on writing. We meet via Zoom from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Mon-Fri). Each day begins with a short group discussion and ends with a 30-minute presentation focused on dissertation writing, but most of the time is devoted to writing. Participants set daily and weekly writing goals and...

Lecture: "John Luther Long, David Belasco, Giacomo Puccini, and Butterfly’s Journey to La Scala and the Met."

Wednesday, May 8, 2024 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Voxman Music Building

Commemorating the 120th anniversary of Madama Butterfly (premiered at La Scala on Feb. 17, 1904), Professor Barker’s Met Opera in HD talk will discuss the opera in its literary, historical, geopolitical, and musical contexts. 

Streaming of the Met performance in Sycamore theater on Saturday, May 11. 

https://www.marcustheatres.com/movies/the-metropolitan-opera-madama-butt...

Hosted by the Opera Studies Obermann Working Group

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Fall 2024) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Fall 2024)

Tuesday, May 7, 2024 5:00pm

Obermann Center Faculty Fellows (formerly 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...

Obermann Center 45th Anniversary Celebration, Featuring Keynotes by Joy Connolly & Antoinette Burton promotional image

Obermann Center 45th Anniversary Celebration, Featuring Keynotes by Joy Connolly & Antoinette Burton

Monday, May 6, 2024 5:00pm
Hancher Auditorium

Please join the Vice President for Research at the Hancher Auditorium's Stanley Café at 5 p.m. on Monday, May 6 to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. The event will feature guests Joy Connolly and Antoinette Burton, prestigious national leaders in the humanities and social sciences. All are invited to the reception afterward to celebrate this important anniversary and the Center’s outgoing director, Professor Teresa Mangum. 

Please RSVP to let us know...