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

Cultivating Our Resilient Humanities Community - NHA visit establishes pilot program

On March 3, a group of thirty scholars, librarians, business owners, and arts administrators sat down to talk about their current and future work in supporting the humanities in Eastern Iowa. Convened by leaders from the National Humanities Alliance, including Stephen Kidd, Executive Director, and Matthew Van Hoose, Project Director (pictured) with assistance from the Obermann Center, the meeting...

Raising the Flag for the Humanities on Capitol Hill

Did you know that more people go to museums each year (850 million) than to all major league sports events and theme parks combined? Or that people with double majors up earnings by 2.3% while a double major that combines the arts, humanities, or social sciences with business or STEM can increase lifetime earnings up to 50%? Well, neither do most people, including elected officials Iowans send...

Teresa Mangum Named Secretary of National Humanities Alliance

Teresa Mangum, director of the Obermann Center, has been elected Secretary of the National Humanities Alliance Board of Directors, the largest humanities advocacy group in the country, located in Washington, D.C. The president of the board is David Marshall, Executive Vice Chancellor of the University of California-Santa Barbara. Mangum will be replacing Pauline Yu, the President of the...

We Did So Much Beyond the Home - Jeannette Gabriel talks about the Jewish Women in Iowa Project

Jeannette Gabriel, a 2013 Graduate Institute Fellow and a PhD candidate in Teaching and Learning, has been crisscrossing the state in an attempt to document a disappearing community. As a graduate research assistant in the Iowa Women's Archives, Gabriel is currently the backbone of the Jewish Women in Iowa Project. This special project was initiated by Joan Lipsky, a former Iowa state...

Kate Kedley - Building Solidarity Between Honduras and Iowa

Artists Take Back Public Space in Honduras As Obermann Graduate Fellow in 2013, Kate Kedley learned to frame research as publicly engaged scholarship, and since then has continued to look for ways to remain in solidarity with the communities and people where she researches. Specifically, her dissertation is an ethnographic study about education and teaching in the Central American country of...

Beyond the Shiny New Toy—Next Frontier for Digital Humanities

Last summer, a group of three scholars commandeered the Obermann Center attic for a month with the goal of pushing their digital humanities (DH) project into a new phase. The team of Blaine Greteman (English, University of Iowa), James Lee (English, Grinnell College), and David Eichmann (School of Library and Information Science...

Teaching Sustainability—Across the Disciplines

Teach-in Focuses on Sustainability Curricula Across Campus Across the globe, people strive for sustainable development, which the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development famously defined as a way of living that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” How can the University of Iowa campus address the great...

Marilynne Robinson to Deliver Lecture, "The American Scholar Now"

As part of the Creative Matters series, Marilynne Robinson will give a lecture titled "The American Scholar Now," on December 9 from 5:30-6:30 pm at The Englert Theatre. This event is free and open to the public. Marilynne Robinson is the recipient of a National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” She is the author of Lila, winner of...

2016 Graduate Institute Fellows Announced

Seventeen UI graduate students from across campus, representing four different colleges, have been selected for the seventh annual Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. This year's co-directors, Craig Just (Civil & Environmental Engineering) and Jennifer Kayle (Dance), and Senior Graduate Fellows Anna Swanson (Cinematic Arts and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) and Jessica...

Diverse Voices "Write to Change the World" - The OpEd Project at the UI

Taking the Plunge in Public Writing — Women represent almost 50 percent of the world’s population. Why is it, then, that the range of voices heard in the world is incredibly narrow and comes from a tiny sliver of the population: mostly western, older, privileged, and overwhelmingly—85 percent!—male? University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Studies Director Teresa Mangum wants to get...

Recent Events

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation

Monday, October 18, 2021 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Virtual

For several generations, Anne Frank has been a household name—the WWII diarist whose posthumously published book has been translated into more than 70 languages. But do younger generations know her story? When they encounter her, what resonates with them?

In this conversation, we'll consider Anne's legacy and the ways her experience as a refugee, a person in hiding, an advocate for human rights, and a joyful creative spirit can speak to new generations.

Speakers will include:

Kirsten Kumpf...
Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2

Friday, October 8, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

How do we respond to and evaluate student writing, including multimodal work, without overwhelming ourselves and our students? This session, the second in a series of two workshops on teaching with writing, will focus on prioritizing course and assignment goals to respond to and grade student writing. It will offer a repertoire of strategies for giving feedback at various stages of the writing process across a range of media from handwriting to digital audio-video. These include designing...

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences promotional image

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences

Tuesday, October 5, 2021 4:00pm
Virtual

While internships are an established part of professional and science graduate programs, they have been a less common opportunity for humanities graduate students. Now, departments and universities are realizing the many benefits for encouraging humanities graduate students to participate in workplace learning. These experiences provide students with a chance to apply their skills, ranging from archival research to critical analysis, to workplaces outside of the academy. Internships bolster...

Esteban and the Children of the Sun promotional image

Esteban and the Children of the Sun

Sunday, October 3, 2021 3:00pm
The Englert

Esteban and The Children of the Sun is a musical suite that imagines and interprets the tricontinental journey of Esteban of Azemmour, the 16th-century Moroccan explorer and first documented African to travel across the North American lands of present-day southwestern United States.

A multi-media production combining music with dialogue, images and projected text, Esteban and the Children of the Sun follows the 2016 musical project, Hot Tamale Louie, a multi-genre collaboration between composer...

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis

Friday, October 1, 2021 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Virtual

The Obermann Center's 2021 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) will take place on Friday, October 1, 2021, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. on Zoom.

Our 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences in three minutes or fewer. The presented research can be a student’s thesis or PhD work, research related to an internship or other outside...

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1

Friday, October 1, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Creating Meaningful Writing Tasks: Breaking Assignments into Smaller Parts

How do we design meaningful formal writing assignments that engage and motivate our students?  How do we use smaller writing-to-learn tasks that scaffold and prepare them for those formal assignments as well as inform us instructors how they are learning what we are teaching?  How do we build multimodal elements into assignments to expand meaning-making opportunities? 

This workshop will focus on designing and...