Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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...

Registration Deadline: Undergraduate Career Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Registration Deadline: Undergraduate Career Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

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

Interested in a career in publishing? In this session on Tuesday, Oct. 6, at noon at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press, will discuss his career path and editorial work. This is an opportunity for students to hear directly from a distinguished professional about the realities of the field and to gain insight into how to prepare for a career in publishing. Pizza will be provided!

Please register by Wednesday, September 30.

B...

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...

The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Katie Holten promotional image

The Language of Trees: A Conversation with Katie Holten

Thursday, October 1, 2026 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Old Capitol Museum
The Anne Frank Initiative will welcome internationally recognized artist and environmental advocate Katie Holten to Iowa City for a conversation about her acclaimed project and book The Language of Trees.
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News

First Iowa City Archive Crawl Celebrates Treasures in Local Collections

Hold History in Your Hands at the First-Ever Iowa City Archives Crawl What gems hide in plain sight in Iowa City’s libraries, museums, and archives? At the area’s first-ever archives crawl, visitors can snoop in between the pages of historic diaries, read other people's mail, hold feathers and fossils, and peer into mysteries revealed by historic artifacts like swords and locks of...
Graduate Institute participants doing a movement exercise

UI students learn the true meaning of public engagement

Thank you to Emily Nelson and Iowa Now for this article about the 2018 Obermann Graduate Institute Some scholars may consider giving a presentation, curating an exhibit, or hosting a medical screening for community groups to be a form of public engagement. Although each of these is an important contribution, the annual Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy encourages...
Exhibit of backpacks found along the Mexican border

The Archeology of Ten Minutes Ago: Preserving the Artifacts of Border Crossing

Across campus and community, you’ll be seeing the poster for our upcoming symposium, Against Amnesia: Archives, Evidence, and Social Justice. We wanted a powerful image to anchor our communications for this event—one that captures the urgency and importance of archiving in today’s political climate, especially in the name of human rights. Living, breathing archives, uncomfortable, incriminating...

UI’s Iowa Native Spaces project works with Meskwaki, Ioway to bring historical perspectives to more Iowans

Reprinted from Iowa Now, this article features a project that was incubated via the Obermann Working Group program and has been directed by Jacki Rand (History, CLAS) who has been an Obermann Fellow-in-Residence and Co-Director of the Obermann Graduate Institute, as well as former Graduate Institute Fellows Eric Zimmer and Dave De La Tore and Obermann HASTAC Scholar Mary Wise. Article by Chris...
Iowa City Archives Crawl logo

Iowa City Archives Crawl - Hold History in Your Hands!

On Saturday, February 24, Iowa City hosts its first archives crawl. You'll hold history in your hands. Get behind-the-scenes tours of local museums and libraries. Talk to experts who can help you with your own home-archiving projects. And learn about projects that scholars and artists are currently creating from the impressive archival holdings of local institutions. Between 11:00 am and 3:00...

February Digital Bridges Events

Two spring events hosted by our Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College/University of Iowa Partnership funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Save the dates for next spring! February 2 and 3: How to Harvest History, A talk and workshop with Rebecca Wingo, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Liberal Arts at Macalester College (PhD, History, University of Nebraska...

Typewriters for Eskimos: Imperialist Rhetoric & Puerto Rico

In 1898, soon-to-be U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge (R-Indiana) urged his fellow Congressmen to “administer government” to the “savages and senile peoples” of Puerto Rico, newly acquired by the U.S. “Shall we save them from [possession by other nations],” he cried, “to give them a self-rule of tragedy? It would be like giving a razor to a babe and telling it to shave itself. It would be like giving...
Christopher Newfield

Colliding Art Forms and Documenting Refugees: The Iphigenia Project

“We don’t collaborate, we collide!” declares Irina Patkanian as she sits down for a conversation with fellow artists Lisa Schlesinger and Marion Schoevaert to discuss their Iphigenia Project and its culminating piece, Iphigenia at Lesvos: Story of a Refugee. The project has been unfolding for several years and reflects not only current world events, but the three women’s process-oriented working...

Colored Conventions Project - Lecture & Workshop with Gabrielle Foreman

Gabrielle Foreman Visit, November 5-7, 2017 — As part of Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College/University of Iowa Partnership, a multi-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support collaborative practices in the humanities, digital humanist Gabrielle Foreman will visit the University of Iowa and give a public lecture and a digital humanities workshop....

Introducing Our Fall 2017 Fellows

Blaine Greteman, English, CLAS Greteman is at work on a book, Networking English Print, which draws from his digital humanities project, Shakeosphere: Mapping Early Modern Social Networks. After mining the publication history of nearly every book printed in English before 1800, Greteman and his collaborators mapped the connections between printers, authors, publishers, and booksellers. By...

Recent Events

Free Film Screening: La Bamba (1987)

Thursday, October 10, 2019 5:30pm to 8:30pm
FilmScene

This free screening of the film La Bamba (1987) is part of the yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on "Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging." The screening will be followed with a post-discussion.

La Bamba is the biographical story of 1950s rock 'n' roll rage Ritchie Valens (born Ricardo Valenzuela), played by Lou Diamond Phillips. The film follows how the 17-year-old Californian went from farm-laborer to overnight success, including his untimely death in a...

Lisa Tetrault Book Reading promotional image

Lisa Tetrault Book Reading

Saturday, October 5, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Lisa Tetrault is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the history of U.S. women, gender, race, and American democracy. Her book, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, traces the making of a story about the foundations of American feminism and interrogates that story’s political purposes, both inside and outside the movement. It won the Organization of American Historians’ women’s history book prize. Tetrault lectures...

“No Room for Maria at the Inn”: Race, Nation, and the Restriction of Maternity Care in El Paso, Texas, 1922-42 promotional image

“No Room for Maria at the Inn”: Race, Nation, and the Restriction of Maternity Care in El Paso, Texas, 1922-42

Friday, October 4, 2019 4:00pm
Schaeffer Hall

Dr. Heather Sinclair will be giving a lectured titled, "No Room for Maria at the Inn": Race, Nation, and the Restriction of Maternity Care in El Paso, Texas: 1922-42. 

Heather Sinclair is an Assistant Professor of History at Dixie State University. Her research focuses on the history of reproduction, midwifery, childbirth, and public health in the late nineteenth- and twentieth century US viewed through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism. She has a background in...

When Women Won the Right to Vote: An American Fiction

Thursday, October 3, 2019 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

A leading historian of the Women’s Rights and Suffrage Movement in the Nineteenth Century explores the myths associated with popular understandings of when, how, and why women initiated social movements for equal citizenship rights.

Obermann Humanities 3MT Competition promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3MT Competition

Friday, September 27, 2019 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

On Friday, September 27, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. at the Iowa City Public Library (Room A), the Obermann Center will host a Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, especially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT competition challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences; the goal of presenters is to present their research in three minutes or fewer. The winner of the Obermann Humanities...

How to Write Effective Letters of Recommendation: A Lunchtime Workshop promotional image

How to Write Effective Letters of Recommendation: A Lunchtime Workshop

Thursday, September 26, 2019 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

In this informal workshop, Obermann Center Director Teresa Mangum will share tips and advice on writing recommendation letters. Come with questions—and bring your own lunch!

This is an informal, lunchtime workshop that is part of the GET IT DONE! series. Everyone is welcome; no registration is necessary.