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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Summer 2026 Obermann Writing Collective promotional image

Application Deadline: Summer 2026 Obermann Writing Collective

Friday, May 22, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

This program offers accountability to artists, scholars, and researchers working on any kind of writing project (articles, essays, fellowship or grant applications, dissertations, book projects, edited volumes, etc.) who want dedicated time, a cozy space, and a community for the practice of writing.Each group meets once a week for 1.5 hours. Weekly writing sessions include brief check-ins, goal setting, and sustained writing time. All groups are open to everyone in the University of Iowa...

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

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Katie Porter's New Book Examines Effects of Consumer Debt

In 2008, Katie Porter (pictured below), then a UI College of Law professor, proposed a topic for the Obermann Summer Seminar on consumer debt in America. For two weeks the following summer, she and a group of eleven participant—including professors in law, psychology, urban and regional planning and medicine—met at Obermann to discuss different perspectives on this topic. Each participant came...

Interdisciplinarity is Focus of Obermann Workshop

Richard Handler, Director of the Program in Global Development Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia will lead a discussion on March 5 at 3:00 pm based on his career as a scholar, teacher and administrator whose work cuts across the geographical and disciplinary boundaries. This informal conversation -- "The Art of Interdisciplinarity" -- will take place in the...

Humanities and Public Life Series Announced

Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center, is co-editing a new book series for The University of Iowa Press with Anne Valk, Associate Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. Humanities and Public Life will feature books examining projects using the arts and humanities to promote community building and civic change. These...

18 Graduate Fellows Engage in Graduate Institute

The 6th annual Obermann Graduate Institute on Public Engagement and the Academy will have three more Graduate Fellows than in past years, thanks to additional funding from the UI Graduate College. This year's co-directors (shown at right), Rachel Williams (GWSS and Art & Art History) and Chuck Connerly (Urban & Regional Planning) will lead a group of students who hail from degree programs as...

Teresa Mangum Joins Imagining America Board

Obermann Director Teresa Mangum has been named to the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Imagining America is a consortium of universities and organizations dedicated to advancing the public and civic purposes of humanities, arts, and design. The UI has been a member for nine years. This year, the UI sent nearly 20 people, including...

Lena Hill Organizes Ellison Events

Incoming Cmiel Semester (Spring, 2012) participant Lena Hill (English) recently organized a weeklong series of panels and readings in association with a visiting producer/director who is adapting Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man for the stage. After participating in a workshop with Hancher Auditorium and the Center for Teaching about how to incorporate Hancher events into UI classrooms, Hill...

Chris Brochu

Chris Brochu (Fellow-in-Residence, Spring 2011) has looked at crocodile fossils in Namibia, Italy, and China. Once in Nairobi, the lights went out and he worked by flashlight. During a visit to a collection of crocodile collectors in France, the associate professor in Geoscience photographed fossils in one member’s backyard while enjoying a bottle of local wine. Brochu didn’t begin graduate school...

Mary Campbell

Mary Campbell notices the hues of people’s skin and sees possibilities. There are possibilities for how medical workers will treat us based on the color of our skin, how much money we’ll make, where we’ll go to school, and even who will be our romantic partner. Skin tone, says, Campbell, an Associate Professor in Sociology and an Obermann Fellow-in-Resident (Fall, 2011), shapes our experiences...
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Music Therapy

The nurses at the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital were bothered by the high pain ratings from kids who had gone through spinal fusion for scoliosis. But one of the therapies that received high ratings for helping with pain was music therapy.This is how Mary Adamek, clinical professor of Music Therapy, and Kirsten Nelson, UI Children’s Hospital music therapist, got the idea to develop a...

Recent Events

Wide Lens: Artificial Intelligence promotional image

Wide Lens: Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, November 30, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

In the past week, you’ve probably asked Google to answer questions, chatted with Siri, rocked out to a new band recommended by Spotify, or asked Chat GPT to produce a first draft of a form letter for you—reminders that our lives are already deeply entwined with artificial intelligence. The term "AI" covers a host of technologies. What connects them? Our very human ambition to create machines that can learn to solve problems. Join us for the next Wide Lens panel as experts from computer science...

Labor Strikes — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Labor Strikes — An Obermann Conversation

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This summer, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) both went on strike, something that hadn’t happened since 1960. These strikes brought Hollywood to a standstill for months and ultimately forced the studios to make major concessions. In September, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union went on strike against the major automakers GM, Ford, and Stellantis. For the first time ever, a sitting president...

Writing for the Humanities workshop promotional image

Writing for the Humanities workshop

Friday, November 17, 2023 12:30pm to 2:30pm
Virtual

This is an online workshop with Professor Eric Hayot (Comparative Literature & Asian Studies, Penn State University), author of one of the most recommended guides to academic writing in the humanities (The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities) and an important commentator on the state of the humanities in general. The workshop welcomes all UI graduate students and faculty interested in practicing and teaching the art and craft of academic writing for the humanities. The event...

Lecture/Discussion featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor Nathan Dize (Washington University-St Louis)

Thursday, November 16, 2023 2:00pm to 3:15pm
Virtual

Lecture/Discussion via zoom featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor and translator, Nathan Dize. Mars’s novel Je suis vivant (2015) and Dize’s translation I am alive (2022) will be discussed. This novel is studied in Professor Curtius's course FREN 4110:0001: Francophone Studies: Literature and the Arts: Haiti. 

Kettly Mars will explore how the 2010 earthquake in Haiti inspired her to write Je suis vivant. Nathan Dize, an Assistant Professor of Francophone Caribbean...

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener promotional image

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

Please join Adam Grener and the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio on Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 4:30 p.m. in the Franklin Miller Screening Room (AJB E105) for a talk titled, "The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form." Co-Sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the University of Iowa's English Department.

Our featured speaker Adam Grener is Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures and Creative Communication Programme at Te Herenga Waka –...

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities promotional image

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities

Thursday, November 9, 2023 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

What’s so smart about smart cities? In 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) launched a program to transform 26 pilot cities in the region to “smart cities,” where services and productivity are enhanced by information and communication technology (ICTs) and new modes of governance. Santos examines these smart cities as assemblages of feminized labor which are digitally extracted and distributed from Southeast Asia-based workers to the Global North. Santos analyze how state...