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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

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...

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...

News

Obermann Grad Fellow Combines Biking Advocacy and Research

Mark Pooley jokes that many people think that winter bike riding is only for the “strong and the fearless.” As someone who rides his bike most days, he acknowledges that even the strong and fearless sometimes look outside on a zero-degree wind chill morning and have second thoughts about riding to work. But what the former Obermann Graduate...

A Year in the Life of the Obermann Center

In the last academic year, the Obermann Center directly served 139 faculty, staff, and graduate students as Fellows-in-Residence and Affiliated Scholars. These participants represent 46 different University of Iowa departments and units and 10 colleges. In addition, hundreds of people from across campus, the greater Iowa City area, and throughout the state attended our programs. Here is just a...
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New Film Celebrates the Humanities

"The more technologically sophisticated we are, the more deeply we need to understand one another. [We need] to teach people empathy, because empathy does not come naturally; to encourage curiosity in broad and diverse ways. And the humanities does those things," says Obermann Director Teresa Mangum in a new film, The Centrality of the Humanities, produced by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the...
Charles Darwin

Internationally Renowned Darwin Biographer to Speak

Exploring Darwin's Motives: Why did Charles Darwin, a rich and impeccably upright gentleman, go out of his way to privately develop a subversive image of human evolution in 1837-39? Why did he pursue the subject with tenacity for three decades before publishing The Descent of Man in 1871? Internationally renowned Darwin biographer James Moore will address these questions and others in his lecture,...

The Unintended Consequences of Rankings

We are a society obsessed with quantifying and ranking things. Neurosurgeons, small towns, and nasal sprays all have their own ranking lists. Someone is a winner and someone is a loser. While many of us are aware of this increased quantification and vaguely understand its potential dangers, Michael Sauder (Sociology, CLAS) is working to make the unintended consequences of this trend and fascination...

Memorializing the Cold War, One Ambiguous Site at a Time

Memorializing the Cold War One Ambiguous Site at a Time: How should the Cold War be memorialized? This question forms the backbone of the Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant project of Sarah Kanouse (Art & Art History, CLAS) and Shiloh Krupar (Geography, Georgetown University).Through their “wishful federal agency,” The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service,” also known as the National...

Imagining America: A Call to Action

A group of nine University of Iowa faculty members, graduate students, and staff attended the Imagining America conference in Syracuse, New York from October 4-6, 2013, "A Call to Action."Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life is a consortium of universities and organizations dedicated...
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Dave Gould Is First Obermann Public Scholar

Though we tend to associate scholarship with the work of campus faculty members, knowledge creation also has strong roots in our communities. The Obermann Center is piloting a Public Scholar program designed to enhance research on campus through partnerships that engage University of Iowa researchers with innovators outside the University. As Obermann...
Herman Gray

Herman Gray Visit Stems from Obermann Cmiel Semester

Herman S. Gray, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will give a public lecture on October 18, 2013, “On Race, Representation, and Resonance,” in Becker Auditorium, Room 101, at 4:00 pm. His lecture engages with the way scholars of television and race often take representation as the site of subject/ion and visibility as the object of cultural politics. Gray asks if...
Nouveau recueil d’ostéologie et de myologie : dessiné d’après nature / par Jacques Gamelin

Health Humanities Planning Sessions

We will host two informal planning sessions for University of Iowa faculty and staff who are interested in next April's Health Humanities Working Symposium. (We are having two meetings in order to accommodate schedules.) If you would like to learn more, to participate in the event, or to meet colleagues working across these domains—from medical anthropologists and historians to poets writing about...

Recent Events

Letter of Inquiry Deadline: HPG Humanities Labs, Summer 2023 promotional image

Letter of Inquiry Deadline: HPG Humanities Labs, Summer 2023

Tuesday, March 7, 2023 5:00pm

The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) Initiative invites applications from UI faculty and partners to design a Humanities Lab. We define a “Lab” as an applied, experiential approach to teaching and learning at the graduate level that offers graduate students meaningful ways to connect advanced studies in the humanities with both a social challenge and skills valued in multiple career settings. The Lab grant will be awarded to one or more faculty members from humanities or humanities...

Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America — A Discussion with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner promotional image

Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America — A Discussion with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner

Thursday, March 2, 2023 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Virtual

On Thursday, March 2, at 2:30 p.m. CST, Professors Tara Bynum (English, CLAS) and Kabria Baumgartner (History and Africana Studies, Northeastern University) will discuss Bynum's new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), which tells the stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free.

Bynum, a 2021 recipient of the Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop...

Reproductive Justice Across Literature, Law & Medicine: Our Bodies Ourselves Past, Present & Future promotional image

Reproductive Justice Across Literature, Law & Medicine: Our Bodies Ourselves Past, Present & Future

Thursday, March 2, 2023 12:00pm to 1:15pm
Virtual

Join us for a conversation between two University of Iowa students and three key figures of Our Bodies Ourselves, the legendary collective that published the groundbreaking text Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1969. This organization has continued to advocate for reproductive justice—developing powerful and inspiring models of health communication, medical education, legal advocacy and literary publishing on the body. Please register for the webinar-style conversation and Q&A, which will range wide and...

Application Deadline: Humanities for the Public Good Graduate Research Assistant (Fall 2023) promotional image

Application Deadline: Humanities for the Public Good Graduate Research Assistant (Fall 2023)

Wednesday, February 15, 2023 5:00pm

The Obermann Center seeks a graduate student to support the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, Humanities for the Public Good (HPG), under the supervision of the Director of the Obermann Center, who is the Principal Investigator on the project. The ideal candidate should be an outstanding scholar-teacher who is interested in conducting and sharing research on the larger ecosystem of the humanities and diverse careers for humanities scholars and learning the skills necessary to be a successful...

*My Electric Genealogy* Performance by Sarah Kanouse promotional image

*My Electric Genealogy* Performance by Sarah Kanouse

Monday, February 13, 2023 6:30pm to 8:00pm
Art Building West

Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance “My Electric Genealogy” explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles and the American West through the lens of her own family. 

“For nearly 40 years my grandfather worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, designing, planning, and supervising the network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of electricity,” Kanouse explains. “The grid was his...

An Evening with Joe Sacco promotional image

An Evening with Joe Sacco

Thursday, February 9, 2023 6:30pm to 8:00pm
University of Iowa Main Library

Join us in conversation with journalist, comics artist, and Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Joe Sacco, (Safe Area Gorazde, Paying the Land) interviewed by Rachel Williams for a talk about race, war, identity but also about his personal creative process and the art of comics. 

This is part of a three-day event devoted to "Drawing Panels and Crossing Borders: Negotiating Self and Other in Comics" with MariNaomi, Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and Jose Alaniz. Organized by the...