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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

Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing promotional image

Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing

Tuesday, January 4, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This is the first in a series of two workshops on teaching with writing on January 4th and 6th from 10 am to 12 pm. The January 4th workshop will focus on designing meaningful writing assignments, teaching analytical reading skills, and scaffolding students through the writing process. The January 6th workshop will focus on responding to and assessing student writing, and dealing with grammar and mechanics.

Faculty and TAs in all disciplines, departments, and colleges (particularly instructors...

Economic Development as Social Justice — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Economic Development as Social Justice — An Obermann Conversation

Thursday, December 2, 2021 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

This summer, a new Story Map of Black-owned businesses in Johnson County was created. It connects users to a rich and ever-growing directory of businesses and entrepreneurs in the eastern Iowa corridor and challenges us to understand the connection between economic opportunities and social justice. Our speakers will help us understand historic barriers faced by BIPOC people interested in starting a business, and why tearing down these barriers matters to all of us.

Speakers:

Daria Fisher...
Understanding Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process: a method for facilitating useful feedback sessions on creative work promotional image

Understanding Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process: a method for facilitating useful feedback sessions on creative work

Thursday, December 2, 2021 11:00am to 12:30pm
Virtual

Vincent Thomas of Towson University worked with Liz Lerman for years as part of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and has an intimate and multi-dimensional understanding of how to apply the CRP across disciplines. In this talk, Professor Thomas will introduce the process, guide us through its application, and answer questions about how to adapt the process to all forms of creative work.

Free and open to all. Join us on Zoom.

This event is hosted by the Department of Theatre Arts, with support from...

Misinformation and Media Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa promotional image

Misinformation and Media Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa

Friday, November 19, 2021 10:00am to 11:15am
Virtual

Join us for a panel presentation and discussion about teaching media literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa and a theory of misinformation literacy.

Panelists:

Peter Cunliffe-Jones Chido Onumah Cornia Pretorius

Peter Cunliffe-Jones was a journalist for AFP news agency for 25 years from 1990 – in western Europe, the Balkans, Nigeria and Hong Kong, as chief editor Asia-Pacific. In 2012 he founded Africa's first fact-checking organization, Africa Check in South Africa. He is a visiting researcher...

Working with a Literary Agent: An Obermann Get It Done workshop promotional image

Working with a Literary Agent: An Obermann Get It Done workshop

Monday, November 15, 2021 12:00pm
Virtual

Featuring Meenakshi Gigi Durham (UI Ombuds, GWSS, and Journalism & Mass Communication) and Carrie Schuettpelz (School of Planning and Public Affairs).

Increasingly, academic authors are seeking ways to publish books that will have appeal beyond their disciplinary audience. Whether it’s a matter of landing a book contract with a non-academic press or finding avenues toward broader readership, such as through magazines and podcasts, having a literary agent can be very helpful. In this GET IT...

What Do We Mean by Research Now?— Perspectives from Academic Podcasters in the US and Canada promotional image

What Do We Mean by Research Now?— Perspectives from Academic Podcasters in the US and Canada

Friday, November 12, 2021 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Virtual

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Humanities for the Public Good are delighted to welcome academic podcasters in the US and Canada for the third round of “What Do We Mean by Research Now?” With the explosion of podcasts across disciplines in the past decade, humanities researchers are finding that podcasts and podcasting can encourage new forms of collaboration, knowledge, and public engagement. But as with any new form of scholarship, podcasts pose challenges for evaluation and...