Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

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 Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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...

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News

Gregg Johnson standing outside of the public library

Iowa Library Advocacy: An American Consultant’s Case Study

This summer I've had the privilege of working with the Development Director of the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation (ICPLFF), Katie Roche. As a Government Affairs and Advocacy Intern, I've relished the opportunity the Obermann Center granted to expand my professional horizons beyond academia and to translate that experience directly into future industry opportunities.
photos scattered across a desk

Connecting to Community Through the Archives

Working with an archive allows us to situate ourselves within a place’s history and connect with the community it has represented over time. This is central to my own filmmaking process, a way of imagining with the narratives of an archive. A creative practice that began with materials from my personal archive (years of iPhone photos and videos, notes, sound recordings) has since developed into deliberate collaborations with people, places, and spaces.
students writing by hand and at computers

UI launches pilot to expand writing across disciplines

The University of Iowa is building on its longstanding excellence in teaching writing and communication with the launch of a new Writing Enriched Curriculum (WEC) pilot program this fall. The program represents an important step toward integrating writing and communication into every discipline and developing a model that can strengthen student outcomes across the university. The pilot program is a collaboration between the Obermann Teaching with Writing Working Group, the Office of Writing and Communication, the Writing Center, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, with additional support from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the Center for Teaching, and the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology.
Laptop with Zoom open

Community, Assessment, and the Work of Showing Up

This summer, I am working as the Community Feedback Framework Intern for the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation. In this position, I'm working on examining current best practices for how libraries can engage intentionally and effectively with the communities they serve. My final project for the internship will be putting together a report that will help guide the library through its community assessment process and help inform future library services, spaces, and programs. Day to day, I interview other nonprofit and community leaders who have recently facilitated their own community and program assessments.
The Community surrounding the Towncrest Center while their street sign is being installed.

Where Money Meets the People: What Academics Can Do for Their Community

Five years ago, I was sitting at a desk a lot like the one I’m sitting at now, doing similar things. In 2021, I taught ESL and adult continuing education classes in Houston, Texas. Teaching both new and established residents made it clear that anybody, from anywhere, could make Houston their home. Working closely with my community, I discovered one of the most important requirements for my students to establish themselves successfully: literacy. Both in language and technology, literacy allowed my students to thrive, get jobs, and build a community.
Robin Johnstone reading book at ICPL

Full Circle: Interning at the Neighborhood Centers

Through the Humanities Without Walls program—administered by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies—I was placed in a paid summer internship at the Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County, a natural fit given the organization’s focus on education and telling stories about the communities they serve. My work this summer involves writing profiles of the staff and neighbors around the Pheasant Ridge community, developing a podcast to highlight a variety of ethnic communities in Iowa City, and utilizing my background in pre-college planning, improvisation, and empowering others to tell their own stories.

Recent Events

What Happens When Robots Write? - A talk by Bill Hart-Davidson promotional image

What Happens When Robots Write? - A talk by Bill Hart-Davidson

Monday, September 24, 2018 4:00pm to 5:30pm
English-Philosophy Building

Did a robot write this blurb? How might we know? And most importantly, can we live, together, with robots who write? In this talk, Bill Hart-Davidson, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Michigan State University, will address that last question to those of us who make our living by reading and writing, and teaching others to read, write and speak well, ethically, with grace and creativity...

2019 Graduate Institute on Engagement & the Academy Info Session promotional image

2019 Graduate Institute on Engagement & the Academy Info Session

Friday, September 14, 2018 9:00am to 10:00am
111 Church Street

Learn about the Graduate Institute and ask questions of a former graduate fellow. Obermann Center Assistant Director Jennifer New will lead the session.

If you are interested in applying for the January 2019 Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, please attend!

Free and open to all.

Visioning and Calendars: Project Management Basics—A Get It Done Workshop promotional image

Visioning and Calendars: Project Management Basics—A Get It Done Workshop

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 12:00pm to 1:00pm
111 Church Street

You have an idea for a project or an event, but is it a good one? That is, is it good enough to be worth the time, expense, and effort that will go into it? Once you land on a project idea, how do you bring it to fruition? In this lunchtime workshop, we’ll work on project visioning, which can be helpful in fine tuning an existing project as well as identifying a new one. We’ll also try our hands at backwards calendaring. You’ll leave with a roadmap for completing your project.

This workshop...

Digital Bridges Symposium - FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC promotional image

Digital Bridges Symposium - FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Wednesday, August 8 to Friday, August 10, 2018 (all day)
MERGE

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

With generous support from our institutions and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College/University of Iowa Partnership has been a fascinating, rewarding, and instructive experience in collaboration, digital pedagogy, and digital humanities practice. Our August 8-10 Digital Bridges Symposium will bring together faculty, staff, and students from both institutions and digital scholars from across the country as we...

Latina/o/x Studies Today — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Latina/o/x Studies Today — An Obermann Conversation

Friday, July 20, 2018 3:00pm to 4:00pm
MERGE

Theorists Vargas, Mirabal, and La Fountain-Stokes (2017) describe Latina/o/x Studies as “an amalgamation of multiple disciplines, theories, and methods” that “has generated an expansive, innovative, and ever-evolving framework to understand the experiences of persons of Latin American and Caribbean descent in the United States as well as broader sociohistorical, political, and cultural processes.” The speakers below, all of whom are in town participating in the weeklong Iowa Workshop in Latina/o...

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered—2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium promotional image

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered—2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Wednesday, April 4, 2018 to Saturday, April 6, 2019 (all day)

Disability is a universal human experience. Like gender, race, class, and sexuality, disability affects everyone in multiple ways, shaping and informing our notions of normality, family, community, fitness, and worth. Disability Studies, one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences and health sciences, examines abilities in the context of societies and cultures as they change over time. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed)...