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

"Racial Reckoning through Comics" closing event with the Hernandez Bros. promotional image

"Racial Reckoning through Comics" closing event with the Hernandez Bros.

Friday, April 14, 2023 10:00am to 6:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Please join us for our last event with some of the most influential artists today, “the Hernandez Bros,” together with Natalia Hernandez and scholars Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina) and Darieck Scott (UC Berkeley). We will enjoy our guests’ presentations at the Iowa City Public Library as well as a variety of events. On Friday, we will play the Love and Rockets: The Great American Comic Book at Filmscene, a documentary that celebrates 40 years of the artists’ career. This is part of...

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2023–24) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2023–24)

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 5:00pm

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 explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals. 

This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a moment when cross...

Out of the Archive: Black Women Behind the Lens — Zeinabu irene Davis's CYCLES (1989) and COMPENSATION (1999) -- Pre-Screening Drinks/Dessert Reception & Post-Screening Conversation promotional image

Out of the Archive: Black Women Behind the Lens — Zeinabu irene Davis's CYCLES (1989) and COMPENSATION (1999) -- Pre-Screening Drinks/Dessert Reception & Post-Screening Conversation

Monday, April 10, 2023 6:30pm to 9:45pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

This special program, part of OUT OF THE ARCHIVE: BLACK WOMEN BEHIND THE LENS, will feature two films by Zeinabu irene Davis. Davis's Compensation (1999), her debut feature film, presents two unique African-American love stories between a Deaf woman and a hearing man. Inspired by a poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, this moving narrative shares their struggle to overcome racism, disability and discrimination. An important film on African-American Deaf culture, Davis incorporates silent film...

Dr. Kim TallBear: The Vanishing Indian Speaks Back: Race, Genomics, and Indigenous Rights promotional image

Dr. Kim TallBear: The Vanishing Indian Speaks Back: Race, Genomics, and Indigenous Rights

Saturday, April 8, 2023 11:30am to 12:15pm
Phillips Hall

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) (she/her) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast...

Oddball Science: Why Studies of Weird Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial. Dr. Patricia Brennan, Mt. Holyoke College promotional image

Oddball Science: Why Studies of Weird Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial. Dr. Patricia Brennan, Mt. Holyoke College

Saturday, April 8, 2023 10:45am to 11:30am
Phillips Hall

Patricia (Patty) Brennan is interested in the morphological evolution of genital morphology in vertebrates and the mechanisms that drive genital diversification, sexual conflict in particular. She has a BSc in Marine Biology from her native Colombia, where she studied the cardiac physiology of marine mammals. She went on to work in the Galapagos Islands aboard a research vessel (R/V Odyssey). Brennan completed her PhD dissertation at Cornell University, where she studied the breeding biology and...

Beyond Inclusion and Reconciliation: Decolonization in Science and Technology. Dr. Kim TallBear, University of Alberta promotional image

Beyond Inclusion and Reconciliation: Decolonization in Science and Technology. Dr. Kim TallBear, University of Alberta

Friday, April 7, 2023 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Biology Building East

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) (she/her) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast Media...