Upcoming Events

Book Ends Information Session (virtual) promotional image

Book Ends Information Session (virtual)

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 8:30am to 9:00am
Virtual

Book 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 faculty members in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books. Read more about the program.

Interested applicants are invited to learn more about the program and application process at a virtual information session on Tuesday, February 3, at 8:30 a.m. Obermann Center Director Luis Martín-Estudillo...

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, February 25, 2026 8:30am to 4:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete tips and operational strategies that support planning and longer-term sustainability.

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

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...

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium promotional image

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium

Thursday, March 26 to Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

Directed by Brian R. Farrell, Daria Fisher Page, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges...

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium promotional image

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium

Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

Directed by Brian R. Farrell, Daria Fisher Page, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges...

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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Spring 2026 Obermann Writing Collective promotional image

Application Deadline: Spring 2026 Obermann Writing Collective

Friday, January 23, 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.

In spring 2026, four writing groups will meet in our Writers' Attic at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at 111 Church St. Each group will meet once a week for 1.5 hours, beginning the week of...

Nomination Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award promotional image

Nomination Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award

Monday, February 2, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

The new Obermann Interdisciplinary Achievement Award recognizes individuals or teams whose trajectories have engaged diverse disciplines to produce insights that would be unattainable within a single academic silo. These scholars cultivate collaborative work, fostering dialogue across academic fields and institutional units. Their research or creative work engages with foundational questions that resonate across society. By recognizing interdisciplinary excellence, the Obermann Center for...

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2026) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2026)

Saturday, February 14, 2026 (all day)
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Fall 2026 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 with...

Spring Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Spring Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Tuesday, February 17, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends—Obermann Book Completion Workshop supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist faculty members in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants promotional image

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Friday, May 8, 2026 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 ten 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

Graduate students: Note that the Graduate College offers Small Grants for the...

News

The Latino Midwest

Latino culture has been helping shape the United States for hundreds of years, even before the U.S. was a country. Though the Latino population in the Midwest is small compared to other areas of the country, it continues to grow, infusing Latino art, literature, and music into the culture of the heartland.The Latino Midwest, the 2012-13 University of Iowa Obermann-International Programs Humanities...

Migration Letters

Alejandro García-Lemos first came to the U.S. from his home in Colombia in order to attend graduate school in 1997. The painter, who now works as an interpreter for immigrants in hospitals and at the courthouse in Columbia, South Carolina, had visited the U.S. many times before finally decided to stay. "You meet someone, life changes," he says with a small laugh. The process of staying has hardly...

Overlap of Gesture and Memory

When Susan Wagner Cook, an assistant professor in Psychology (CLAS) submitted a paper on hand gestures a few years ago, she received feedback from reviewers that her understanding of memory was about twenty years behind. Disappointed, but also knowing that she was unlikely to assimilate two decades of research into her thinking without serious commitment, she tabled the paper. She gave it second...

Fall 2012 Fellows-in-Residence

The Obermann Center welcomes its Fall 2012 Fellows-in-Residence next week. Six UI faculty members and one UI graduate student will work on projects ranging from the historical relationship between humans and mosquitoes in the Upper Mississippi River Basin to mathematical problems in X-ray dark-field tomography. The Fellows include the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship...

Taking a Page from Industry to Clean Up Drinking Water

There is more in that glass of water you just drank than meets the eye. Caffeine, perfumes, ibuprofen, and hormones are just a few of the pollutants that are not regulated and for which wastewater plants do not commonly treat. Known as “emerging contaminates,” these pollutants are accepted largely because there is no clear way to remove them. And so we all drink them regularly. What if we could...
Lisa Heineman

Working Group Members Perform and Gain an Award

Lisa Heineman (History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies) and Kim Marra (Theatre Arts and American Studies) formed one of the inaugural 2011 Obermann Working Groups in order to explore how scholars might communicate their academic interests through performance and artists might use researchers’ methods to explore issues they usually address before live audiences. As scholars, Marra and...
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Recent Events

CANCELED: Humanities for the 21st Century: A conversation

Wednesday, April 15, 2020 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Old Capitol Museum

Update 3/11/2020: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.

 

 

Latina/o/x Cultural Citizenships & Popular Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Cultural Citizenships & Popular Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, March 27, 2020 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

After having addressed issues surrounding formal citizenship and national belonging in the previous semester, this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- will bring subject area experts to discuss modalities of popular belonging (television, sports, music, literature, and more) in Latina/o/x contexts in the U.S.

Speakers include the following: Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and...

Canceled
The Art & Science of Attention — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

The Art & Science of Attention — An Obermann Conversation

Wednesday, March 25, 2020 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

NOTICE: This event has been postponed. We hope to reschedule soon. Please check back.

Please join us for this free, public Obermann Conversation about attention and focus. We are living in an age of distractibility. Understanding how our brains attend and focus, as well as what we can do to cultivate attention, is necessary for our effectiveness and happiness. 

Shaun Vecera's (Psychological and Brain Sciences) overarching work attempts to understand the basic yet complex mechanisms of...

Canceled
What Can Museums Become: "Future Media of Museums" promotional image

What Can Museums Become: "Future Media of Museums"

Saturday, March 7, 2020 2:00pm to 3:30pm
Art Building West

The 2020 Obermann Humanities Symposium, "What Can Museums Become?", will bring together a distinguished group of museum directors, curators, educators and artists who will reflect on the transformative work that museums perform in the twenty-first century.

 

The closing keynote lecture on Saturday will be delivered by Michelle Kuo, who is the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. In "Future Media of Museums," she will explore the evolving impact of...

What Can Museums Become? —2020 Obermann Humanities Symposium promotional image

What Can Museums Become? —2020 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Saturday, March 7 to Monday, March 9, 2020 (all day)

Museums have never been mere containers for objects, nor should they be. How might we draw strength from existing institutions to enable vibrant futures? How can we expand the communities who feel a sense of belonging within and around museums? What must we confront and transform to make this possible? Join the artists, curators, historians, educators, and thinkers who are asking, "What Can Museums Become?"

Keynote speakers include Johanna Burton, Director of the Wexner Center for the Arts at...

What Can Museums Become, Relationality and Performance: A Critical Genealogy promotional image

What Can Museums Become, Relationality and Performance: A Critical Genealogy

Friday, March 6, 2020 7:00pm to 8:00pm
University of Iowa Main Library

The 2020 Obermann Humanities Symposium, "What Can Museums Become?", will bring together a distinguished group of museum directors, curators, educators and artists who will reflect on the transformative work that museums perform in the twenty-first century.

Friday’s Keynote lecture: “Relationality and Performance: A Critical Genealogy” will be delivered by Amelia Jones, a feminist curator who is also the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Research at the Roski School of Art and Design at...