Upcoming Events

Eleanor Waltzes: Women’s Poetry and Music for Eleanor Roosevelt During the Great Depression promotional image

Eleanor Waltzes: Women’s Poetry and Music for Eleanor Roosevelt During the Great Depression

Saturday, September 26, 2026 3:00pm
Voxman Music Building

“Eleanor Waltzes” honors First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt through performances of songs and poetry created and sent to her by American women. The event will also feature an exhibit of materials from the Iowa Women’s Archives and a “making do” reception with 1930s recipes. “Eleanor Waltzes” is part of Sounding the Nation at 250, a series of commemorative concerts surrounding the U.S. Semiquincentennial sponsored by the Society for American Music.

Saturday, Sept. 26, 2026, 3 p.m.

Recital Hall, Voxman...

Registration Deadline: Junior Faculty and Graduate Student Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Registration Deadline: Junior Faculty and Graduate Student Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

University of Iowa junior faculty and graduate students at all stages are invited to join Walter Biggins—editor-in-chief at the University of Pennsylvania Press—for a light breakfast and a conversation about turning an article, thesis, or dissertation into a book on Tuesday, Oct. 6, from 9–10:30 a.m. at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies library. Please bring any questions you have about that process or about scholarly publishing in general.

Register by Wednesday, September 30.

Biggins is...

Registration Deadline: Undergraduate Career Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Registration Deadline: Undergraduate Career Session with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

Interested in a career in publishing? In this session on Tuesday, Oct. 6, at noon at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press, will discuss his career path and editorial work. This is an opportunity for students to hear directly from a distinguished professional about the realities of the field and to gain insight into how to prepare for a career in publishing. Pizza will be provided!

Please register by Wednesday, September 30.

B...

RSVP Deadline: AMA with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

RSVP Deadline: AMA with Walter Biggins, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, September 30, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

UI faculty, students, and staff are invited to attend ask-me-anything group discussions with Walter Biggins—editor-in-chief at University of Pennsylvania Press—at 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 1 at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Questions might address finding an editor, pitching a book, writing a book proposal, how the publishing process works, etc.

There will be two back-to-back discussions; you may attend one or both.

Please RSVP by Wednesday, September 30.

Free and open to all.

Bi...

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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 of all ranks and with significant research responsibilities to turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

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

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: 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...

News

Two Obermann Scholars Awarded Public Engagement Grants

Chuck Connerly, Urban & Regional Planning, Graduate College and co-director of the Obermann Graduate Institute, and Karla McGregor, Communications Sciences & Disorders, CLAS, and a Spring 2011 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, have received Public Engagement Grants (PEG) via the Office for the Vice President for Research. These competitive awards, which are in their inaugural year, are...

Civic Science - Beyond the Knowledge Wars

John Spencer, director of "Get Ready Iowa," the 2012 Obermann Summer Seminar, and Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, published this article in the Huffington Post on May 31. An abbreviated version appeared in the Iowa City Press Citizen on June 12. Today, we face multiplying global crises—from economic collapse to global warming to crises in education and...

Civic Science at Center of Summer Seminar

A new kind of research is at the heart of this June’s Obermann Summer Seminar. Based on a model of civic science, the seminar will bring together educators, developmental scientists, policy makers, and parents to consider how to improve school readiness for Iowa’s three- to five-year olds.“We are trying to stay very open to possible outcomes,” says John Spencer, Director of the DeLTA Center and...

Kevin Chamberlain's "Insect" Exhibit Opens

“Insects: A Collection in Multiple Dimensions”—featuring artwork by University of Iowa graduate student Kevin Chamberlain—opens May 3 at 5 p.m. in the UI Pentacrest Museums Gallery for the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences at the Old Capitol Museum.The exhibit includes digital photographs and three-dimensional artistic renderings of specimens from the UI Museum of Natural History’s 100-year-old...

Raquel Baker and Ted Gutsche

Raquel Baker (English, CLAS) and Ted Gutsche (Journalism and Mass Communication, CLAS) met via the Obermann Graduate Institute. Today, the two PhD candidates are using their mutual interests in civic engagement and social justice to create a General Education Literature course that takes students into the local community to find "concealed stories" and share them with a broader audience. One of the...

HASTAC Scholars Organize THATCamp Iowa City

From Friday, March 31 to Sunday, April 1, THATCamp Iowa City took place in The University of Iowa Main Library. THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) was organized by UI HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) scholars Melody Dworak (MLIS candidate, Graduate College) and Katherine F. Montgomery (English PhD candidate, CLAS). Following an “unconference”...

stef shuster: Transgender Activist, Academic Pioneer

stef shuster recalls the frustration experienced when filling out the Institutional Review Board (IRB) application to conduct graduate research.“It was very formulaic, and so many of the questions were constructed in a binary way,” says the 29-year-old University of Iowa doctoral student in sociology who is conducting research on transgender communities and identities—and whose name is...

Lobbying for the Humanities

As director of the Obermann Center, I often represent the University of Iowa at national meetings. In March, I headed to Washington, D.C. to the annual meeting National Humanities Alliance (NHA) and its Annual Advocacy Day along with Colin Gordon, UI professor of history, and Derek Willard, Special Assistant to the President and Associate VP for Research in the UI Office of Governmental Relations...

Kathleen Diffley

What would you learn about the current war in Afghanistan if you were to take as your sources several current magazines, say People, The New Yorker, and Newsweek? The story that would come into focus from such disparate sources may not offer a complete timeline of events, but it would provide a sense of what the people reading those publications cared about: a soldier’s homecoming, an intimate...

Graduate Institute Fellows Present at Jakobsen Conference

The culmination of each year's Graduate Institute is for participants to create a project that combines some aspect of their research and/or teaching with a community-based issue or organization. This year's Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows will present their projects at this year's Jakobsen Graduate Conference on March 24 from noon to 5:00 at the IMU. The Graduate Fellows' projects include a...

Recent Events

Journal Publishing Now: A Conversation with Jennifer Bean, Lauren Cramer, and Patricia White promotional image

Journal Publishing Now: A Conversation with Jennifer Bean, Lauren Cramer, and Patricia White

Tuesday, April 23, 2024 12:30pm to 2:00pm
Virtual

Please join us for a panel conversation about academic publishing with three esteemed editors of interdisciplinary journals: Jennifer Bean (University of Washington; Feminist Media Histories), Lauren Cramer (University of Toronto; liquid blackness), and Patricia White (Swarthmore College; Camera Obscura). The panelists will discuss the nuts-and-bolts of journal publishing (for would-be contributors as well as would-be editors), and they will also each reflect on key directions in the fields of...

Public Lecture: “Made to be Seen: Kongo Graphic Writing as a Basis for Rethinking the Transmission of Knowledge” - Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, Visiting Scholar, School of Art and Art History promotional image

Public Lecture: “Made to be Seen: Kongo Graphic Writing as a Basis for Rethinking the Transmission of Knowledge” - Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz, Visiting Scholar, School of Art and Art History

Wednesday, April 17, 2024 5:30pm
Art Building West

Visiting Scholar Professor Bárbaro Martínez-Ruiz will be giving a public lecture titled “Made to be Seen: Kongo Graphic Writing as a Basis for Rethinking the Transmission of Knowledge.”

Professor Martínez-Ruiz is the Tanner-Opperman Chair of African Art History in Honor of Roy Sieber at the Department of Art History at Indiana University. He is also Senior Research Associate in African Art and Its Diaspora at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town...

Joseph Graves. A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Discusses How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Some of Our Biggest Problems promotional image

Joseph Graves. A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Discusses How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Some of Our Biggest Problems

Saturday, April 13, 2024 10:45am to 11:30am
Phillips Hall

Joseph L. Graves Jr. is a professor of biological science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and former associate dean for research at the Joint School for Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. His research focuses on the genomics of adaptation and evolutionary theories of aging. He has also written two books that address myths of race in the U.S. and is frequently interviewed for articles, podcasts, and documentaries on this topic.

2024 Iowa City Darwin Day promotional image

2024 Iowa City Darwin Day

Saturday, April 13, 2024 10:00am to 12:30pm
Phillips Hall

Every year to mark Charles Darwin’s birthday, Iowa City Darwin Day organizes a two-day celebration of science designed to promote scientific literacy and increase public awareness of the contributions of science to society. The featured speakers for the 2024 events on April 12 and 13 are Joseph Graves Jr., Harmit Malik and Heather Sander. All talks are free and open to all. 

Joseph Graves Jr. is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at North Carolina Agricultural...

Harmit Malik: Rules of Engagement: Molecular Arms Races Between Primate and Viral Genomes promotional image

Harmit Malik: Rules of Engagement: Molecular Arms Races Between Primate and Viral Genomes

Friday, April 12, 2024 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Biology Building East

Harmit Malik is a biologist, a member of the USA National Academy of Sciences, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. His research focuses on genetic conflict and has direct implications for understanding human disease. Dr. Malik will also give a talk for the public, “Paleovirology: Ghosts and Gifts of Ancient Viruses,” on Saturday, April 13.

This talk is part of Iowa City Darwin Day Science Fest, a two-day celebration of science designed to promote scientific literacy and increase public...

Joseph Graves: Race, Health, and the Built Microbiome promotional image

Joseph Graves: Race, Health, and the Built Microbiome

Friday, April 12, 2024 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Biology Building East

Joseph Graves Jr. is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Dr. Graves’ research focuses on the evolution of adaptation and evolutionary theories of aging. He has risen to international prominence as the author of two books that address myths of race in American society, The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend That Race Exists in America. ...