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

Wednesday, January 13, 2027 1:00pm to 5:00pm
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...

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

Micromagnets: On the Path To Greater Energy Efficiency

Johna Leddy (Chemistry, CLAS) is very enthusiastic about the possibility of improving electrochemical systems such as batteries and fuel cells to provide energy and fuels with greater efficiency. “We might be able to build a low temperature fuel cell that runs on alcohol,” says Leddy, who was a Fall 2013 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence. “It could make us less dependent on foreign oil and processes...

Obermann Fellows in Conversation—Race Relations in the U.S. South

A wonderful aspect of the Obermann Center is the way in which people from across the University meet and have unexpected conversations. While many of our programs invite people to form unique collaborations to achieve a specific outcome, such as publishing an article or developing a grant application, our longest running program, the Fellows-in-Residence, is intended to support individual projects...

2014 Graduate Institute Fellows

Seventeen UI graduate students have been selected as Obermann Graduate Fellows and will participate in the 2014 Obermann Graduate Institute. The Institute is a highly competitive program for graduate students across the University who are interested in developing publicly engaged dimensions for research, arts, and teaching. The weeklong Institute (January 13-January 17, 2014) includes...

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...

Recent Events

A reading by Murata Sayaka and Ginny Tapley Takemori promotional image

A reading by Murata Sayaka and Ginny Tapley Takemori

Tuesday, October 30, 2018 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Gilmore Hall

The Japan Foundation New York together with International Programs, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the Obermann Center, and the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures present a workshop and bilingual reading with Murata Sayaka and Ginny Tapley Takemori on Tuesday, October 30, 2018.

Murata Sayaka is one of Japan’s most prominent writers, known for her frank explorations of the role of sex and gender in contemporary society. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize...

Murata Sayaka and Ginny Tapley Takemori promotional image

Murata Sayaka and Ginny Tapley Takemori

Tuesday, October 30, 2018 2:00pm to 3:15pm
Phillips Hall

The Japan Foundation New York together with International Programs, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the Obermann Center, and the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures present a workshop and bilingual reading with Murata Sayaka and Ginny Tapley Takemori on Tuesday, October 30, 2018.

Murata Sayaka is one of Japan’s most prominent writers, known for her frank explorations of the role of sex and gender in contemporary society. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize...

Gerrymandering, Voter Registration, and Access to the Ballot—An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Gerrymandering, Voter Registration, and Access to the Ballot—An Obermann Conversation

Thursday, October 25, 2018 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

How is voting restricted in our country in lawful ways? For this Obermann Conversation, political scientist Tracy Osborn, grassroots organizer Sharon Lake and legal advisor Andrew Bribriesco will discuss issues ranging from gerrymandering, Iowa's voter registration law, voter identification, and lack of voting rights for felons. 

Tracy Osborn is an associate professor in the UI Department of Political Science and the director of the Politics and Policy Program at the Iowa Public Policy Center...

Get It Done! Flow: Finding (And Keeping!) Joy in Academic Writing & Research promotional image

Get It Done! Flow: Finding (And Keeping!) Joy in Academic Writing & Research

Tuesday, October 16, 2018 12:00pm to 1:00pm
111 Church Street

Most of us have experienced inspiration and a sense of discovery in our research, moments that remind us, this is why I do it. Flow, however, can feel all too rare—crowded out by meetings, never-ending email, or the challenges we face when we sit down to write and think. 

Amidst these intensities, finding (and keeping!) joy in our research might seem like a luxury. Yet in addition to potentially making our days more pleasant, cultivating pleasure in our research can enhance its rigor...

Exploring Women in Sports and Title IX's Legacy—An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Exploring Women in Sports and Title IX's Legacy—An Obermann Conversation

Tuesday, September 25, 2018 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Our first Obermann Conversation of the semester features Diane Williams (M.S., M.A.Ed., and doctoral candidate in American Studies and GWSS) and Megan Oesting, head coach of the Eastern Iowa Swim Federation and the Eastern Iowa Swim School.

Diane and Megan, both lifelong athletes and coaches, will provide a primer on Title IX, why it was created and how it’s been used (or not used) since its inception; review the experiences of female coaches; and discuss how having a female coach affects...

What Happens When Robots Write? - A talk by Bill Hart-Davidson promotional image

What Happens When Robots Write? - A talk by Bill Hart-Davidson

Monday, September 24, 2018 4:00pm to 5:30pm
English-Philosophy Building

Did a robot write this blurb? How might we know? And most importantly, can we live, together, with robots who write? In this talk, Bill Hart-Davidson, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Michigan State University, will address that last question to those of us who make our living by reading and writing, and teaching others to read, write and speak well, ethically, with grace and creativity...