Upcoming Events

Application Deadline: Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Application Deadline: Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, September 9, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

For this workshop, five UI faculty members will submit book proposal drafts for a collaborative feedback session on Wednesday, Oct. 7, from 9 a.m. to noon, led by Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press. The session is designed to help authors write a compelling book proposal, with a focus on crafting a strong pitch, identifying target audiences, and outlining the project’s structure. The workshop’s goal is for participants to walk away with a strong and cohesive book...

Eleanor Waltzes: Women’s Poetry and Music for Eleanor Roosevelt During the Great Depression promotional image

Eleanor Waltzes: Women’s Poetry and Music for Eleanor Roosevelt During the Great Depression

Saturday, September 26, 2026 3:00pm
Voxman Music Building

“Eleanor Waltzes” honors First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt through performances of songs and poetry created and sent to her by American women. The event will also feature an exhibit of materials from the Iowa Women’s Archives and a “making do” reception with 1930s recipes. “Eleanor Waltzes” is part of Sounding the Nation at 250, a series of commemorative concerts surrounding the U.S. Semiquincentennial sponsored by the Society for American Music.

Saturday, September 26, 2026, 3 pm

Recital Hall, Voxman...

RSVP Deadline: AMA with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

RSVP Deadline: AMA with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

UI faculty, students, and staff are invited to attend ask-me-anything group discussions with Walter Biggins—editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press—at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 1 at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Questions might address finding an editor, pitching a book, writing a book proposal, how the publishing process works, etc.

There will be two back-to-back discussions; you may attend one or both.

Please RSVP by Wednesday, September 30.

Free and open to all.

Bi...

Registration Deadline: Junior Faculty and Graduate Student Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Registration Deadline: Junior Faculty and Graduate Student Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

University of Iowa junior faculty and graduate students at all stages are invited to join Walter Biggins—editor-in-chief at the University of Pennsylvania Press—for a light breakfast and a conversation about turning an article, thesis, or dissertation into a book on Tuesday, Oct. 6, from 9–10:30 a.m. at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies library. Please bring any questions you have about that process or about scholarly publishing in general.

Register by Wednesday, September 30.

Biggins is...

View more events

Spacer

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

It All Depends on 31 Syllables: A Study of the Power of Japan's Medieval Waka

Imagine if your social stature and your livelihood were dependent on your ability to write poetry and refer to the work of other poets. If there were poetry competitions among the elite that decided one’s worthiness. Or if the entire direction of a nation could be changed via 31 syllables. Japanese waka, a 31-syllable precursor to haiku, held just this kind of sway for several centuries...

Black Curators' Roundtable Examines Changing Practices

This Friday's Black Curators' Roundtable is a first chance to hear some of the issues that will be central to the 2019–20 Obermann Humanities Symposium, What Can Museums Become? Led by trans poet, artist, curator, and UI alumnus Anaïs Duplan (pictured above), the event gathers three others curators to discuss their practices and trends. Facilitated by Duplan, founding curator for the Center...
Christie Vogler

First Humanities 3-Minute Thesis Winner Crowned

Making a case for the presence of a female medical practitioner working out of a villa in Sicily, circa 1-3 A.D., anthropology PhD candidate Christie Vogler wowed the judges and the crowd at the first-ever Humanities 3MT competition on September 27. The Obermann Center hosted the event to celebrate and share the work of the UI's humanities graduate students, and to give them a chance to practice...

A Clown Walks Into the Matrix...

Or how one group is searching for the holy grail of live entertainment Paul Kalina is wearing a suit that has three kinds of technology embedded in it. He is a clown who has performed bedside for kids in hospitals and on the barest of stages. But in June 2019 he is in Prague for the world’s largest festival of theater and stage design, the PQ—or Prague Quadrennial. He is going on stage...

Why You – Yes, YOU Who Is Only Partway into a Dissertation and Who Doesn’t Have Time – Need to Do the Humanities 3MT!

There was one humanities finalist in last year’s University of Iowa 3MT competition--Miriam Janechek. She was in the midst of writing her English literature dissertation about 19th-century Victorian children’s literature and religion, while simultaneously caring for a baby and a toddler and living in St. Paul, MN. It would have been easy for her to view the competition, in which participants...

Executive Directors of MLA, AHA to Participate in Humanities Career Diversity Symposium

On September 13 and 14, 2019, Paula Krebs and Jim Grossman—executive directors of the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association, respectively—will join other national leaders of engaged graduate education for a UI-led symposium on public scholarship, experiential learning, and humanities graduate education. University of Iowa PhD students who participated in this summer's...

Relying on the Unreliable: Historian Catherine Stewart Examines 1930s Domestic Workers

Obermann Fellow-in-Residence Catherine Stewart’s current book project, The New Maid, relies in part on a highly unreliable source—student essays. Specifically, Stewart is interested in what is divulged through a cache of papers written by students at a private women’s college in the South in response to the topic, “Negro servants in my household.” Written between 1928 and 1940, the nearly 100...
Ashley Cheyemi McNeil

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil Appointed 2019-21 HPG Postdoctoral Scholar

Interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Ashley Cheyemi Rae McNeil has been appointed the 2019–2021 Postdoctoral Scholar for the Andrew W. Mellon–Funded Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) initiative. McNeil earned her bi-national PhD in English from Georgia State University and in American Studies from the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. As...

Misfitting: Symposium Connects Disabilities Studies Scholars, Shines Light on Need for Scholarly Leadership at UI

Tricia Zebrowski and Douglas Baynton pulled off a wonderful finale this spring. The two retiring professors—Zebrowski is in her first year as an Emeritus in Communication Sciences & Disorders, while Baynton retired in May 2019 from History—co-directed “Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered,” the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium. During three days in April, the pair helped to host eminent...

Recent Events

Travel is Home promotional image

Travel is Home

Friday, April 5 to Saturday, April 6, 2019 (all day)
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

In April, the University of Iowa Japanese Program will host more than twenty scholars from around the world as part of an international conference, "Travel is Home," exploring travel and landscape in Japanese literature, art, and culture.

Organizers Kendra Strand, assistant professor of premodern Japanese literature and visual culture, Kendall Heitzman, assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture, and Morten Schlütter, associate professor of Chinese religion and Buddhist studies...

Travel is Home promotional image

Travel is Home

Thursday, April 4, 2019 6:00pm to 9:00pm
University Capitol Centre

In April, the University of Iowa Japanese Program will host more than twenty scholars from around the world as part of an international conference, "Travel is Home," exploring travel and landscape in Japanese literature, art, and culture.

Organizers Kendra Strand, assistant professor of premodern Japanese literature and visual culture, Kendall Heitzman, assistant professor of Japanese literature and culture, and Morten Schlütter, associate professor of Chinese religion and Buddhist studies...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Reception promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Reception

Thursday, April 4, 2019 5:30pm to 7:00pm
MERGE

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "Family Misfits in the Frankenstein Ballet" promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "Family Misfits in the Frankenstein Ballet"

Thursday, April 4, 2019 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Welcome by Tricia Zebrowski & Douglas Baynton promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Welcome by Tricia Zebrowski & Douglas Baynton

Thursday, April 4, 2019 4:00pm to 4:15pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium promotional image

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Thursday, April 4 to Saturday, April 6, 2019 (all day)

Disability is a universal human experience. Like gender, race, class, and sexuality, disability affects everyone in multiple ways, shaping and informing our notions of normality, family, community, fitness, and worth. Disability Studies, one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences and health sciences, examines abilities in the context of societies and cultures as they change over time. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed)...