Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar promotional image

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

The Research Development Office is hosting an in-person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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...

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News

Performance from the Dance.Draw series at UNC-Charlotte, by Rob Singh-Latulipe.

Designing the Digital Future: Highlighting Informatics Work in the Arts and Humanities

Search “informatics” on Wikipedia and you’ll get a hint of the very wide swath that this relatively new field has already cut: bioinformatics, irrigation informatics, legal informatics, music informatics, cheminformatics, and disease informatics are just a few of its subfields. An idea that has been around for barely a half century...
2014 Imagining America PAGE Fellows

Reflections on Imagining America from UI’s PAGE Fellows

Moving the Middle — Reflections on Imagining America’s national conference by Heather Draxl: The theme of this year’s Imagining America conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, was “Organizing. Culture. Change.” Those three words were intended to “represent concentrations of energy and activity across higher education and within the IA consortium” and played a role in one of the conference’s primary...
Crescendo poster

Obermann-Incubated Project Comes to a Crescendo

Masks give us permission to explore new ideas or to more bravely enact ways of being that we don’t usually give ourselves permission to pursue. They invite playfulness, humor, parody, and even a bit of mischief. Think Halloween costumes and masquerade balls. All of the qualities that masks allow and invite also make them a clever tool for exploring social issues, which is the aim of a new UI...
Bruce Gronbeck

Remembering Longtime Obermann Scholar Bruce Gronbeck

In January 1986, just days before the nation and the University of Iowa were scheduled to celebrate Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday for the first time, the Obermann Center was asked if we could “put together something” as part of the University’s observance. I was panicked, but then remembered that Bruce Gronbeck, a new guy at the Obermann Center, had been talking at...
One of thousands of photos that have been digitized as part of the Ft. Madison Prison Memory Project.

Incarcerated in Iowa - Relationship Forged at the Obermann Graduate Institute Results in Prisons Project and Symposium

Conversation Begins at Obermann Graduate Institute: Kathrina Litchfield, recent SLIS grad and a current PhD candidate in Language, Literacy, and Culture (College of Education) and Gemma Goodale-Sussen (English, CLAS) met for the first time last January as Fellows of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. As they shared their respective public engagement projects, each woman...
SumSem_group2_1.jpg

Social Practice Art: Engaging Multiple Perspectives

The role of art in society has long been debated. If an artist works in a university and in combination with community partners, that definition becomes murkier yet.As part of the Obermann Center’s Summer Seminar, “Problem Solving Social Practice in Art,” a group of scholars, community organizers, and artists cast a wide net on the idea of “social practice in art,” examining and exposing gaps in...
HWW logo

Humanities Without Walls — Opportunities for Humanities Faculty and Graduate Students

Andrew W. Mellon–funded Grand Challenge — The Global Midwest As we announced last year, the Obermann Center is one of 15 centers in the $3,000,000 Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls Consortium headed by Professor Dianne Harris of the University of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Applications are welcome from faculty at two or more consortial universities whose scholarship...

"Obermann Afternoons" Line Up Announced

Obermann Afternoons, the Obermann Center's informal speakers series, launches again this fall. “Anthropocene 101" leads the way on September 17 from 4:00 to 5:30 pm, as Barbara Eckstein (English, CLAS), Bradley Cramer (Earth & Environmental Sciences, CLAS), and Tyler Priest (History, CLAS) give a preview of their spring Humanities Symposium, Energy Cultures in the Age of the Anthropocene. They will...
Food for thought poster

Food for Thought, First Theme Semester

Obermann Co-sponsors Next Year's "Food for Thought"—First University of Iowa Theme Semester. It began with a small group of people and a big idea: rallying academic, arts, and community events around a common theme, connecting people and programs in original ways. Over the last few months, that idea has taken root. Next spring, it’ll bear fruit with a collection of initiatives under the banner...

Designing Technologies for Children

Jennifer New
Seven years ago when Juan Pablo Hourcade (Computer Science, CLAS) published a review article about designing technologies for children, smartphones were not widespread, the iPad hadn’t been introduced, nor had motion-sensing gaming devices like Kinect. A lot has changed in terms of how children can access technology and what they can do it with. And yet there still is not a succinct overview of...
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Recent Events

Humanities Without Walls Info Session promotional image

Humanities Without Walls Info Session

Monday, February 15, 2021 8:30am to 9:30am
Virtual

The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies is proud to be a member of the Andrew W. Mellon–funded Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, which fosters collaborative research and explores the contributions of humanities in the workplace.

HWW has provided the Obermann Center funding to help UI faculty prepare proposals for HWW seed grant applications (due in November 2021). To learn more about the seed grants and how to apply for them, we welcome you to attend one of our upcoming Zoom...

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Information Session (#2) promotional image

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Information Session (#2)

Friday, February 12, 2021 8:30am to 9:30am
Virtual

Join us for this virtual information session if you're interested in submitting an application to direct a 2022–23 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar.

Zoom link: https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/97541317741?pwd=TDVhUzQrYVYzUklNcnVtOWdLSXdDdz09

Free and open to all.

About Sawyer Seminars:

The Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.  The seminars, named in...

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Information Session promotional image

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Information Session

Tuesday, February 9, 2021 8:30am to 9:30am
Virtual

Join us for this virtual information session if you're interested in submitting an application to direct a 2022–23 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar.

Zoom link: https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/97541317741?pwd=TDVhUzQrYVYzUklNcnVtOWdLSXdDdz09

Free and open to all.

About Sawyer Seminars:

The Mellon Foundation's Sawyer Seminars were established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on the historical and cultural sources of contemporary developments.  The seminars, named in...

I Spy: How to Read a Grant Application — An Obermann GET IT DONE! Lunchtime Workshop promotional image

I Spy: How to Read a Grant Application — An Obermann GET IT DONE! Lunchtime Workshop

Wednesday, February 3, 2021 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Virtual

The first step to secure a grant is to learn to be a careful close reader of calls for proposals. What key terms and concepts should you seek? How does the grant language match the funder’s mission? How can you actively demonstrate that your project will help funders achieve their goals? We’ve asked Kristi Fitzpatrick—Director of the Grant Support Office in the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences and one of the campus’ sharpest readers and writers of grants—to share her advice.

Free and open...

Podcasting with Purpose: Annie Galvin promotional image

Podcasting with Purpose: Annie Galvin

Thursday, January 28, 2021 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Calling all podcasters, podcast enthusiasts, and podcast newbies! Learn from expert podcasters about the craft of podcasting with purpose, from the nuts and bolts of recording and editing audio to the intellectual and creative labor of audio storytelling. As part of our goal to prepare graduate students for a wide range of careers serving the public good, Humanities for the Public Good is exploring new and innovative methods of interpretation, storytelling, and meaning-making. The Podcasting...

Cultural Postmortem 2020 promotional image

Cultural Postmortem 2020

Wednesday, January 27, 2021 4:30pm
Virtual

How can artists and scholars help the nation contend with the peril in which we find ourselves—starting with our own campuses? The 2020 US presidential race was one of the most politically and ideologically divisive and contentious races that we’ve ever seen. And as the events of January 6, 2021 have illustrated, the nation remains divided to the point where political leaders at the highest level are challenging election results without any evidence or basis in reality and a largely white group...