Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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...

Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Thursday, May 31, 2029 (all day)
111 Church Street

Books 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 turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

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News

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...

Ortiz-Guzmán Appointed 2019-20 Sawyer Seminar Postdoctoral Fellow

Directors of the 2019–20 Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar, “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging,” have selected interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Guzmán as the Seminar’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Ortiz-Guzmán earned her PhD in Educational Policy Studies with graduate minors in Latina/o Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana...

Not Distracted: Aiden Bettine Balances Traditional Scholarship and Public Engagement Projects

Aiden Bettine, the first Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) Graduate Fellow, is already embodying the goals of this grant. A historian with a strong commitment to public scholarship, Aiden is pushing the boundaries of his discipline in experimental and collaborative directions. With funding and support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the...

Four CLAS Graduate Students Chosen for National Humanities Center Education Program

Four University of Iowa PHD candidates have been selected to attend the 2019 Graduate Student Summer Residency Program at the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. From July 15 to 26, Aiden M. Bettine (History), Enrico Bruno (English), Hadley Galbraith (French & Italian), and Mary Wise (History) will join approximately 100 fellow humanities graduate students...

Andrew Tubbs: Scholar, musician, disability advocate, comedian

Andrew Tubbs would like to see more researchers recognize the influence that disability has on their work—no matter the field of study. “It’s beneficial for researchers to understand that disability inherently intersects with their work,” Tubbs says. “Being able to come at issues, research questions, and problems from a disability perspective helps nuance arguments.” The University of Iowa...
Street pickers with can carriers in Matanzas, Cuba

Yellow Fever's History of Humans, Microbes, and Ideas

Yellow fever was once a terrifying killer that violently took the lives of half of the people who contracted it. It killed workers building canals, soldiers engaged in sieges, and investors on fact-finding missions. A viral disease spread between humans and primates, it is caused by a species of mosquito that prefers clean, fresh water. Before this was proven decisively in 1901, yellow fever was a...

NHA Advocacy Day

Obermann Director Teresa Mangum joined hundreds of humanities faculty members, center directors, and leaders of professional organizations like the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association in Washington, DC. As part of the annual NHA Advocacy Day, they shared the educational, social, and economic benefits of the arts and humanities. The NHA especially encourages...
Esco in his 20s wearing a suit and bowtie

An Aerial View—Remembering Esco Obermann

Esco Obermann embodied interdisciplinarity. That's him in the photo to the right, upside down on his parents' windmill in Yarmouth, Iowa. (Look closely—the soles of his shoes are aligned with the motor.) Esco, one of nine siblings, grew up doing acrobatics on his family's farm in southeastern Iowa—backbends on bulls, rope stunts in haylofts, L-sits on windmills—as if driven to seek new...

Recent Events

Wide Lens: WATER - interdisciplinary research exchange & conviviality at the Stanley Museum of Art promotional image

Wide Lens: WATER - interdisciplinary research exchange & conviviality at the Stanley Museum of Art

Thursday, December 1, 2022 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

Inspiration & exchange across the disciplines

For each gathering in the new Wide Lens series, scholars and/or artists from across the university will briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest (pecha kucha–style), and then open the floor to questions and discussion over food and drink at the ever-inspiring Stanley Museum of Art.

Wide Lens is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for...

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament promotional image

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

Quality childcare is an elemental need. It allows parents to work at paid jobs, which in turn helps to support the economic well-being of our communities. Equally as crucial, it provides early childhood development for the next generation.

Anyone who has tried to find quality childcare, however, knows that it is not easy to find—or very affordable. In the past five years, Iowa has lost more than a third of its childcare providers, and the cost of child care amounts to 15.3% of the average Iowa...

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried promotional image

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

British lawyer Alexander McLean, the founder of Justice Defenders (formerly African Prisons Project), will discuss his work transforming communities, justice systems, and countries from inside out. Sponsored by the UI Lecture Committee, Center for Human Rights, College of Education, School of Music, International Programs, Citizen Lawyer Program, and Obermann Center supported Prison Writing Project.

The event will also be livestreamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Dq6K-wUjE 

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America" promotional image

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"

Friday, November 11, 2022 2:30pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

UPCOMING POROI SEMINAR (!)
Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"
 
Dr. Vázquez will be circulating the introduction to his book, States of Defeat, for us to workshop with him! He writes, “After over a century of international political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked on the twenty-first century and discerned that revolutionary struggle, previously an instrument for seizing an emancipated future, had somehow run aground. My book, States of...

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics promotional image

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics

Friday, November 4 10:30am to Saturday, November 5, 2022 4:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

To continue our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar devoted to “Racial Reckoning Through Comics,” we turn to critical and creative approaches to representing historical as well as potential futures of racial trauma, testimony, possibility, and expanded narrative. How have comics neglected as well as addressed racialized histories or imagined racialized futures? In addition to presentations from our dynamic speakers, this event will include a guided archival tour of rare comics artifacts from the...

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop promotional image

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 5:00pm

Launched in 2015 as an initiative of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, this annual workshop welcomes 30 participants each summer from higher education institutions across the United States. HWW Summer Workshop Fellows work in a variety of academic disciplines. They are scholars and practitioners who bring experience in community building, museum curation, filmmaking, radio programming, social media, project management, research, writing, and teaching. They are invested in issues of...