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

Meet the Manuscript with Obermann Graduate Fellow Heather Wacha

28 beaver fur hats. 6 panels of tapestries. Wool from Flanders. Silks, cloths, and linens. Furniture, paintings, and sculptures. Gold and Silver. All manner of carriages. If you had been an heir of the estate of Don Francisco Muñoz Carillo, a nobleman from Cuenca, Spain, who died in 1687, you may have received some part of these items. However, before you get too excited, you would have also...

2015-16 Obermann Annual Report

Welcome to the 2015-16 Obermann Center Annual Report! View the report in its entirety. I often find the best inspiration for the year ahead is a quick look in the rearview mirror. That’s certainly true for the Obermann Center, where that mirror frames a panorama of fellow travelers—faculty, staff, students, and partners—in 2015–16. In Summer 2015, faculty with Obermann Interdisciplinary...

Humanities research and the human condition

This article by Obermann Center Director Teresa Mangum appeared in the July 14, 2016, edition of Iowa Now: If you follow news about higher education, you know that the value of humanities scholarship—the study of the arts, cultures, history, languages, literature, philosophy, and religion—is often called into question. Pummeled by busyness, technical challenges, health care costs...

Open-Access Tools Make Research Available to All

Not so long ago, if you wanted to read The Odyssey, you needed several massive—and expensive—tomes: the original text, appendices of endnotes, maps, and family trees, maybe even a Greek dictionary. Today, thanks to digital humanists like Sarah Bond (Classics, CLAS) and Paul Dilley (Classics and Religious Studies, CLAS), you can access many classical texts online, for free, with notes...
human immunodeficiency virus

Reviving Biophilia—Mary Trachsel Considers Our Disconnect from the Natural World

Animals on Campus Humans share the state of Iowa with as many as 20 million hogs, in addition to millions of chickens and cows. In a state so densely populated with non-human animals, why are they so invisible to us on the University of Iowa campus? This wasn’t always the case. In the 1800s, a fence was erected around the Pentacrest to keep pigs off the grounds. An early professor of writing...
Noaquia Callahan portrait, German Fulbright award winner

A Q&A with 2016-17 Fulbright winner Noaquia Callahan

A Q&A with 2016-17 Fulbright winner Noaquia Callahan Authored by Benjamin Partridge About Noaquia: Noaquia Callahan, P.h.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa and 2016-17 Fulbright grant winner. Noaquia Callahan, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa, is one of 13 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant winners from the UI for 2016-17. Callahan was chosen as...
Cultural Textural Exchange.jpg

Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar to Focus on Eurasian Manuscripts in 2016-17

Cultural and Textual Exchanges: The Manuscript Across Pre-Modern Eurasia Exploring manuscript diversity before the printed book During the 2016-17 academic year, a core group of University of Iowa faculty and graduate students will work to map cultural exchanges across Eurasia from roughly 400 CE ­ ca. 1450 CE, by focusing on the development, distribution and sharing of manuscript...

Digital Bridges to Obermann - Summer 2016 Institute and Collaborations

This summer the Obermann Center will host a number of faculty projects thanks to the generous support of our Andrew W. Mellon Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry partnership with Grinnell College. The goal of the grant is to experiment with ways that faculty and students from a liberal arts college and a research university can mutually enrich their scholarship and teaching through creative...

Why I Give to the Obermann Center - Ken Brown

The Obermann Center holds a special place in my heart. This is so not because of Director Teresa Mangum’s southern charm or the cookies in the kitchen, although both are gifts to all who visit. Instead, I love Obermann for what it offers to scholars on this campus, and for the opportunities it has given me to be in community with these very scholars. "Obermann offers the impetus and the...

HASTAC Scholars Reflect on Graduate Institute Symposium

On March 3-4, 2016, the Obermann Graduate Institute celebrated its tenth anniversary. In addition to welcoming back alumni of the program, including Tala Al-Rousan (Harvard), Ted Gutsche (Florida International University), Bridget Draxler (Monmouth College), and Craig Eley (ACLS Scholar, Wisconsin Public Radio), we were also joined by founding co-director David Redlawsk, currently at Rutgers and...

Recent Events

Midwest Graduate Music Consortium Conference 2024

Saturday, April 6, 2024 8:00am to 9:00pm
Virtual

The 28th annual meeting of the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (MGMC) will be hosted by the University of Iowa on April 6-7, 2024. This conference will feature paper presentations, a new music concert by the University of Iowa New Music Center, and a keynote address by Dr. Eric Saylor, Professor of Musicology at Drake University.

MGMC is a joint venture organized by graduate students from the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and the University of...

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies, Keynote Presentation promotional image

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies, Keynote Presentation

Friday, April 5, 2024 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

On April 5 from 4 to 5 p.m. Dr. Lena Hill will deliver the 23rd annual Craft Critique Culture interdisciplinary graduate conference keynote presentation in the Academics Room of the Iowa Memorial Union (IMU, Room 256). Dr. Hill is the provost at Washington and Lee University. Before working at Washington and Lee she was a faculty member and administrator at the University of Iowa where she taught in the English and African American Studies Departments. She is the author of Visualizing Blackness...

Campus and Local Community Spaces as Collaborative Lab for Environmental Research—Inspiration from Leaders at Other Campuses promotional image

Campus and Local Community Spaces as Collaborative Lab for Environmental Research—Inspiration from Leaders at Other Campuses

Friday, April 5, 2024 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Around the country, visionary faculty members and administrators are finding inspiring ways to engage students, artists, researchers, staff, and community partners in learning about and responding to climate change and its environmental effects through the very landscapes in which they live and work. As part of this year’s Obermann series, “Envisioning Interdisciplinary, Experiential Environmental Research,” we are thrilled to welcome two leaders whose brilliant cross-sectoral, cross...

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies promotional image

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies

Friday, April 5, 2024 12:00pm

On April 4–6, 2024, English graduate students are hosting the 23rd annual Craft Critique Culture interdisciplinary graduate conference on the University of Iowa campus. This year’s conference addresses themes of “Black Legacies.” For this conference, “Black Legacies” is, first, a recognition and continued contribution to the history of Black Studies programs in colleges and universities, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. “Black Legacies” is also a way to honor and celebrate the power of...

Second Language Acquisition Graduate Symposium

Friday, April 5 to Saturday, April 6, 2024 (all day)
Virtual

Attending and presenting at this two-day event is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to gain experience presenting their own research, as well as meeting other researchers with similar interests.

This year’s conference will be in a blended format. Presenters and attendees can attend virtually or in person. This format invites graduate students from the host institutions (the University of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin-Madison), within the United States, and internationally.

Title...

Celebrando Nuestra Herencia: A Conversation with Bilingual Community Leaders promotional image

Celebrando Nuestra Herencia: A Conversation with Bilingual Community Leaders

Thursday, April 4, 2024 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Celebrando Nuestra Herencia: a conversation with bilingual community leaders. 

This event is hosted by the Spanish Heritage Speakers in the Classroom Obermann Working Group.