Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Holding Space: Stories of Interdisciplinary Collaboration — Counterpoint event featuring Stephanie Miracle promotional image

Holding Space: Stories of Interdisciplinary Collaboration — Counterpoint event featuring Stephanie Miracle

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 5:00pm to 6:15pm
Voxman Music Building

Join us to celebrate the interdisciplinary work of University of Iowa choreographer and assistant professor of dance Stephanie Miracle, recipient of the 2026 Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award.

Miracle will bring together dance, engineering, and the humanities in a brief improvisational performance featuring dancers Bea Beaman and Trinity Woody performing alongside robots built by the University of Iowa College of Engineering, with narration by Eric Gidal and music by Jean-François...

Coping with Collective Trauma on Stage promotional image

Coping with Collective Trauma on Stage

Thursday, October 15, 2026 12:30pm to 1:45pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)
Acclaimed theater director, translator and chair of theater arts Roy Horovitz will perform "The Final Final Solution" in the Black Box Theater at the IMU. This performance event, along with associated lectures in the afternoon, "Laughing at our own Tragedies" and "Theatre & The Holocaust", will be of interest to faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and members of the community.
Bilingual Readings with Kawaguchi Harumi and Rina Kikuchi promotional image

Bilingual Readings with Kawaguchi Harumi and Rina Kikuchi

Friday, October 16, 2026 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Iowa City Public Library
Join the University of Iowa (UI) Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS), an International Programs affinity group, for a special evening of bilingual readings featuring acclaimed Japanese poet Kawaguchi Harumi and translator Rina Kikuchi.
Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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News

Designing Technologies for Children

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...

Christopher Newfield penetrates "humanities crisis"

On April 28, we invite you to join Christopher Newfield (University of California, Santa Barbara) as he asks, “What Are the Humanities For—in the 21st Century?” One of the country’s most energetic analysts of higher education funding, Newfield has such diverse interests and expertise that his talk may range from literature to economics and corporate culture to the roots of American education and...

Health Humanities: Building the Future of Research and Teaching

Health Humanities: Building the Future of Research and Teaching, a two-day Obermann Working Symposium, promises to be a paradigm-shifting moment for the University of Iowa and a leap forward in the larger field of the health humanities. The six keynote speakers include the editors of the two forthcoming health humanities anthologies, Paul Crawford and Tess Jones, as well as the editor of a graphic...
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Inquiring About Affect - A Conversation with Naomi Greyser

How might the work of artists, scholars, and activists be more pleasurable and easeful? How might our working environments and labor conditions be more healthy? These are some of the questions this year’s Obermann Humanities Symposium, Affect & Inquiry, will address. Co-directed by Naomi Greyser (Rhetoric, CLAS), Deborah Whaley (American Studies, CLAS), and Jeffrey Bennett (Communication Studies...

2nd Iowa Humanities Festival: From Jamaica to Rome in a Day

Alta Vista, Bettendorf, Camanche, Elkader, Humboldt, Jamaica, McGregor, Persia, Rome, Zwingle—far-flung corners of the world have found their way into the very names of Iowa cities and towns. The 2014 Iowa Humanities Festival, “A World at Home | A Home in the World,” invites you to travel the world while staying right at home in the “French” city of Des Moines...
Sarah Guyer

Designing the Future for Publicly Engaged Research and Teaching in the Humanities

A recent New York Times Opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof—“Professors, We Need You!”—inspired national debate about the status of “public intellectuals.” The Obermann Center continues the conversation on March 10, 2014, with the next two speakers in our yearlong...

Andrea Charise On the Health Humanities Frontier

Using music to manage chronic pain. Training the eye to see emotional as well as physical symptoms of suffering in a gallery of portraits. Absorbing a sense of well-being through encounters with the written word. Bringing together the arts, humanities, and health sciences offers incalculable benefits. This April, the Obermann Center will offer a...

Comics in the Library, Museum and Classroom - Rachel Williams and Corey Creekmur Make a Case for Comics in Academia

Comics: Their Time Has Come — Three years ago, Corey Creekmur (Cinema & Comparative Literature and English, CLAS) and Rachel Williams (Art & Art History and GWSS, CLAS) and their colleague Ana Merino (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS) co-directed a highly successful Obermann Humanities Symposium, "Comics, Creativity, and Culture." The three-day event fostered dynamic exchanges between notable creators and...
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Wall to Wall

Standing on the Great Wall of China in 1991, Mohammad Chaichian wondered at the feat of architecture and engineering that extended in front of him as far as he could see. Although the wall was ostensibly built to keep out nomadic “barbarians,” Chaichian, a sociology professor with training in architecture and urban planning, wondered how those on the other side, the so-called barbarians, viewed it...
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Obermann Part of Major Collaborative Mellon Award

Obermann Center Member of Major Collaborative Mellon Grant The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $3,000,000 for an innovative two-year project, “Humanities Without Walls,” that will include faculty and graduate students at the University of Iowa. In addition to the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the collaboration includes fourteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond. By...

Recent Events

Wide Lens: Memory promotional image

Wide Lens: Memory

Friday, May 5, 2023 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

What is forgotten? What is remembered? How reliable are our recollections? What ethical questions could or should guide how we engage with others’ memories? Join us at the Stanley Museum of Art as six scholar-artists reflect on memory from the perspective of various disciplines.

This is the second gathering in the UI's new Wide Lens series, in which researchers, scholars, and artists from across the university briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest, pecha kucha–style, at the...

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Fall 2023) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Fall 2023)

Tuesday, May 2, 2023 5:00pm

Obermann Center Faculty Fellows (formerly Fellows-in-Residence) fully devote themselves to projects within an interdisciplinary community. The program supports artists, researchers, and scholars during periods when focus and feedback are crucial. The program is rooted in our mission: to support the work of individual scholars, while also providing Fellows with the opportunity to enrich an individual, discipline-specific project through interdisciplinary exchanges with a lively intellectual...

Finding Funding: Wise and Witty Ways to Search — An Obermann Get It Done workshop with Mary Blackwood promotional image

Finding Funding: Wise and Witty Ways to Search — An Obermann Get It Done workshop with Mary Blackwood

Thursday, April 27, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

Do you have a great idea for a project but need some funding to accomplish it? Learn about how committing an hour of your week can pay off! In this session, Mary Blackwood, Senior Sponsored Research Specialist at the UI Division of Sponsored Programs, will talk about how to set yourself up for grant-seeking success, how to manage roadblocks on the journey, and why anyone—from experienced faculty to newbie grad student—can increase their chances of getting a grant award by finding the right...

Craft, Critique, Culture Conference promotional image

Craft, Critique, Culture Conference

Thursday, April 20 to Saturday, April 22, 2023 (all day)
English-Philosophy Building

Our embeddedness within a more-than-human world is one part of what defines us as human. In the 1940s, Iowa-based environmentalist Aldo Leopold offered a land-based ethic: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” We hope to hear papers pursuing questions within and adjacent to the environment, broadly conceived. We are interested in how life is becoming less livable and for whom that is happening...

University of Iowa Lecture Committee: Jelani Cobb - "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today" promotional image

University of Iowa Lecture Committee: Jelani Cobb - "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today"

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 7:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Please join Jelani Cobb, author and Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, for his lecture "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today."

All University lectures are free and open to the public. 

This lecture is sponsored by the following University of Iowa Departments and Programs: African American Studies, American Studies, Cinematic Arts, CLAS Dean's Office, Communication Studies, History, Magid center for Writing, English, Obermann Center, and the Provost's Office. 

Canceled
“He is remarkable for…wearing a Handkerchief tied round his Head”: Resistance as Escape and Cultural Retention in the Canadian Fugitive Slave Archive - Zoom Lecture - Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson - School of Art and Art History promotional image

“He is remarkable for…wearing a Handkerchief tied round his Head”: Resistance as Escape and Cultural Retention in the Canadian Fugitive Slave Archive - Zoom Lecture - Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson - School of Art and Art History

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 5:00pm
Virtual

Bio:
Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2020-2022, she was a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax, Canada, where she founded the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. She also...