Upcoming Events
Application Deadline: Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence
Wednesday, September 9, 2026 5:00pm
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
Saturday, September 26, 2026 3:00pm
“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
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
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
Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
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...
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Upcoming Application Deadlines
Upcoming Application Deadlines
News
The Texture of Memory: Pervin Saket's Project to Preserve Parsi Heritage
Imagine a small boat on large, dark sea. Imagine families of refugees, with small children and smaller bundles of belongings. Imagine them braving storms and starvation and shipwreck. It sounds like something from yesterday’s news report, but this historical exodus took place between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, when Arab Muslims conquered the once-expansive Persian Zoroastrian empire. Faced with religious persecution, groups of Zoroastrians escaped in boats and landed on the shores of Gujarat in India. Pervin Saket’s project as an Obermann International Fellow focuses on this community, her community, in modern-day India.
Allies in Healing: Katy Schroeder and the Human-Animal Interactions for Wellbeing Collaborative
The first time Katy Schroeder truly understood the positive impact of connecting people with animals in therapy, she wasn’t sitting in a lab or behind a desk. She was standing beside a horse. “I realized how passionate I was about integrating human-horse interactions into mental health treatment,” she recalls. “It was such a powerful realization.”
At the time, Schroeder was living in Bend, Oregon, and pursuing her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. The idea of incorporating animals into therapy wasn’t new — but it also wasn’t widely studied or regulated. Still, something about it clicked. It lit a path she hadn’t seen before. “I caught the research bug,” she says. Encouraged by a mentor, Schroeder stayed on to earn her doctorate at Oregon State University, where she discovered her second calling: teaching. “That’s really when everything started to come together for me.”
That clarity eventually led her to the University of Iowa, where she now serves as an associate professor in the College of Education's Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program in the Department of Counselor Education. There, she’s quietly reshaping how students — and the field—understand the relationship between humans and animals in mental health care.
From the Hank Lab to the Streets of Romania: A Conversation with Patricia Marga
In a nation confronting one of the highest rates of traffic accidents in Europe, the simple act of crossing the street is a critical public health challenge. This issue is the driving force behind the work of Patricia Marga, a PhD student in public health from Romania. She's on a mission to tackle this crisis by exploring how virtual reality can be harnessed to study and improve pedestrian safety for the most vulnerable: elderly citizens crossing busy city streets and children navigating crowded school zones. Her pursuit of research methods on injury prevention brought her to the University of Iowa this fall as an Obermann International Fellow.
A Language in Motion: Jordan Gigout and Dance Notation
How do you write down a dance? To capture the body’s expressions, scholars have long turned to Kinetography Laban, a system for recording and analyzing movement that uses abstract symbols to define the direction of movement and the parts of the body that perform it, among other parameters. But what happens when that language of symbols is itself a historical artifact, reflecting the biases of its time? Can a system built on a specific vision of the body ever truly capture the full diversity of human movement, or does it inevitably shape what it records? This is the critical and creative realm of Jordan Gigout, a dancer and dance-notation scholar from Essen, Germany. His research explores how this historical language for movement can continue to evolve and inspire new ways of thinking about choreography today. This fall, we welcomed him as an Obermann International Fellow.
Time, Care, & the Moral Self with Shazia Rehman Khan
Often, an hourly employee, bound by the routines and schedules of a workplace, finds that she is constantly thinking about being somewhere she is needed more, perhaps at home, taking care of a child or elderly relative. While many researchers have studied how this internal conflict affects the worker's professional output, few have studied how it affects her self-image or moral self-concept. This is the province of Shazia Rehman Khan, Professor of Business and Social Ethics at Pakistan's Bahria University. Her scholarship asks whether women are the primary victims of organizational time structures (as they must often balance workplace schedules with demands for care and domestic work) and, more generally, how "clock time" shapes our moral selves. Khan recently spent a month at the University of Iowa as an Obermann International Fellow furthering her research on time justice and care ethics.
Inside Scholarly Publishing: A Conversation with Sara Jo Cohen
Ahead of her November residency, we asked Obermann Editor-in-Residence Sara Jo Cohen about what she hopes to accomplish during her time here, her advice on crafting strong proposals, the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing, and the exciting ways digital platforms are expanding scholarship. She also shared her own career journey from graduate study in English to university press publishing, reflected on the skills early-career scholars most need to cultivate today, and offered practical guidance for undergraduates seeking a foothold in the publishing world.
Rethinking Aging with Mercedes Bern-Klug
How often do you spend time with people significantly older than you? Not very often, if you’re like most Americans. “We live in an age-segregated society,” notes Mercedes Bern-Klug, professor, mentor, researcher, and practitioner at the UI School of Social Work. “Young people hang out with young people. Teenagers hang out with teenagers. There are few opportunities for the generations to mix, outside of places of worship.”
A Wonderful Place to Write
The week after classes finished in the spring, I had the opportunity to participate in the Obermann Center’s End-of-Year Writing Retreat. The retreat offered faculty, staff, and students dedicated time to work on writing projects, which I hoped to spend editing my novel, a climate dystopia that centers on youth empowerment and the feeling of hopelessness that many of us experience as the climate changes despite our many efforts. Upon receiving an email of acceptance to the retreat, I was in class and could barely keep from grinning. However, underneath all that excitement, I felt a flicker of impostor syndrome. I didn’t know anyone in the retreat, and to make it more daunting, I was the only undergraduate student. So, even as I texted my friends and parents, overjoyed that I had been accepted, I was worried that I would be completely out of place.
Rasheedah Liman: Bridging Continents Through Eco-Theatre
This spring, we welcomed—and recently bid a regretful farewell to—Rasheedah Liman, director, playwright, and Professor of Theatre and Performing Arts at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Radiating enthusiasm from the moment she arrived, Rasheedah immersed herself in the UI theatre community and in discussions with faculty across the university. Liman is a scholar and practitioner of eco-theatre, a theatrical form that, in her words, "recognizes the potential of theatre to contribute to environmental consciousness, with the goal of harnessing the transformative power of the stage to engage audiences, evoke emotional responses, and promote environmental awareness."
Narrating Pain, Shaping Poetics: Gabriela Román Fuentes Drafts Novel and Play during Obermann Fellowship
This spring, we welcomed Obermann International Fellow Gabriela Román Fuentes, an award-winning Mexican author, to campus. Her research centers on the representation of illness and female bodies in contemporary Latin American literature. “I am interested in the way diseases are depicted and how authors address pain and intimacy in their writing, as well as how bodies and illnesses have shaped their work,” Fuentes explains. “I regard illness and female bodies not only as mere topics, but also as a structural device and/or a maker of their Poetics.” This research is the foundation for two of Fuentes’s new creative projects, a novel about a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease and a play about hysteria.
