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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

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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

February 9-11: Racial Reckoning through Comics promotional image

February 9-11: Racial Reckoning through Comics

Thursday, February 9 6:30pm to Saturday, February 11, 2023 6:00pm
Iowa City Public Library/UI Obermann Center

For the next "Racial Reckoning Through Comics" event, we will engage in conversation with artists MariNaomi and Joe Sacco as well as scholars Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and José Alaniz to discuss how colonial dynamics are involved in racialization processes. From the global to the local, from international conflicts to the everyday life in times of peace, our artists’ stories and our scholars’ analyses will explore how the grammar of comics can imagine, write, and draw anti-racist and anti...

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session promotional image

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session

Monday, January 23, 2023 3:00pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

Note: This event has been canceled. Please email obermann-center@uiowa.edu if you would like more information about the Humanities Lab opportunity.

The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good 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...

Canceled
Anna Barker: “Why Mozart? Why Women? Why Now?” promotional image

Anna Barker: “Why Mozart? Why Women? Why Now?”

Wednesday, January 18, 2023 5:30pm to 6:30pm
University Capitol Centre

Professor Anna Barker (Asian & Slavic Languages & Literatures, UI) will share her enthusiasm for the music of Mozart and the Cedar Rapids Opera production of Cosí fan tutte: The Soap Opera, which will be performed on the following dates: 

Jan. 20, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22, 2023 at 2 p.m.

At the Paramount Theatre in Cedar Rapids (123 3rd Ave SE).

The lecture is organized by the interdisciplinary Opera Studies Forum (via the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies), and is free and open to...

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom) promotional image

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom)

Thursday, January 12, 2023 10:00am to 12:30pm
Virtual

This series of two workshops will focus on best feedback and commenting practices to help students improve their writing and their learning. Faculty from different fields will lead presentations and discussions on the following topics:

Commenting on intermediate and final stages of writing projects Teaching commenting and feedback skills to TAs Designing effective peer review sessions Developing and implementing criteria for student self-assessment of writing

Vickie Molloy from the...

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom) promotional image

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom)

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 10:00am to 12:30pm
Virtual

This series of two workshops will focus on best feedback and commenting practices to help students improve their writing and their learning. Faculty from different fields will lead presentations and discussions on the following topics:

Commenting on intermediate and final stages of writing projects Teaching commenting and feedback skills to TAs Designing effective peer review sessions Developing and implementing criteria for student self-assessment of writing

Vickie Molloy from the...

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session promotional image

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 11:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good 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-adjacent...