Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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...

Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Thursday, May 31, 2029 (all day)
111 Church Street

Books 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 turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

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News

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Obermann Center symposium’s ‘Frequências’ film festival explores Afro-Brazilian cinema

The door of no return; the reinvention of belonging; Blackness in Brazil; these topics and more were the focus of this year’s Obermann Humanities Symposium. Presented in Iowa City by the Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Project Award, the “Frequências” festival displayed lectures, cinema screenings, interventions, exhibits, and performances by contemporary Afro-Brazilian artists and scholars discussing Black diaspora.
Ariani Friedl

Building Bridges: The MOSTRA Brazilian Film Festival

Cris Lira: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how the idea for the Mostra: Brazilian Film Series has started.   Ariani Friedl: I am Brazilian, 'gaúcha' (RS), and I have been living in the United States for over 50 years.  I worked at the University of Illinois @ Chicago for over 20 years as Director of the John Nuveen Center for International Affairs.  I was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Latino Cultura Center for over 15 years and also organized the Chicago Latino Film Festival in 2006 when our Director was on a leave of absence.  I have the fortune of meeting many of our Brazilian filmmakers who attended the Latino Festival which always brings 3 - 4 Brazilian films.   The question always posed by our Brazilian filmmakers was:  "How can we better publicize and where else can we show our Brazilian cinema in the United States?" The idea of creating a festival with only Brazilian films in the Chicago area was born from this and it developed with another idea of bringing films with social conscience to be discussed in universities and other cultural and educational centers. C.L.: Could you please tell us how do you select the films to be featured in the series?  A.F.: I bring to our festival every year, different Brazilian film critics and filmmakers.  I also have collaborators in SP who attend many of our film festivals in Brazil and help me collect a list of films with relevant social content, and also films related to our culture (art, music, literature, dance...), history, environment, etc...  We compile these in a document with trailers and synopses and present them to my Curatorial Committee (composed of professors, critics, and experts in cinema) for a decision in which films we will invite to our festival.
Lauren Burrell Cox

Lauren Burrell Cox is Obermann's New Assistant Director!

We're happy to announce that Lauren Burrell Cox has become Obermann's new Assistant Director! She'll be working with our director, Teresa Mangum, to design, plan, promote and conduct programs and to oversee communications for the Center.
Frequencias codirectors

Frequências Symposium: A Discussion with Three Co-organizers

Taking Brazil’s new Black cinema as its point of departure, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora will feature the emerging wave of young Afro-Brazilian filmmakers, curators, programmers, and scholars whose art and scholarship have already had an impact on international cinema. Organized by Christopher Harris, Janaína Oliveira, and Cristiane Lira, this 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium and International Programs Major Projects Award takes place March 30 – April 1, 2023, in Iowa City. Below is a discussion with Harris, Oliveira, and Lira.
Hand holding up mirror, reflecting peninsula near bridge

Frequências symposium a historical gathering of Brazilian filmmakers and scholars on the UI campus

Taking Brazil’s new Black cinema as its point of departure, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora brings together filmmakers, artists, scholars, and critics from across the globe to explore new ways of thinking about the Black diaspora. This 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium and International Programs Major Projects Award takes place March 30 – April 1, 2023, in Iowa City. Organized by Christopher Harris, F. Wendell Miller associate professor of cinematic arts at the University of Iowa; Janaína Oliveira, curator and researcher at the Federal Instituto of Rio de Janeiro; and Cristiane Lira, supervisor of Portuguese at the University of Georgia, the symposium will feature the emerging wave of young Afro-Brazilian filmmakers, curators, programmers, and scholars whose art and scholarship have already had an impact on international cinema.
HPG logo

Working to Create Nets: A Humanities for the Public Good Update

Back when we all traveled regularly to conferences, we did so to share research, to learn from colleagues, and to form new relationships, even friendships, rooted in shared intellectual interests. Conferences help graduate students build skills—capturing complex arguments in short presentations, public speaking, asking helpful rather than grandstanding questions, connecting with fellow experts, and more. In other words, conferences are for networking.

Recent Events

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation

Monday, October 18, 2021 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Virtual

For several generations, Anne Frank has been a household name—the WWII diarist whose posthumously published book has been translated into more than 70 languages. But do younger generations know her story? When they encounter her, what resonates with them?

In this conversation, we'll consider Anne's legacy and the ways her experience as a refugee, a person in hiding, an advocate for human rights, and a joyful creative spirit can speak to new generations.

Speakers will include:

Kirsten Kumpf...
Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2

Friday, October 8, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

How do we respond to and evaluate student writing, including multimodal work, without overwhelming ourselves and our students? This session, the second in a series of two workshops on teaching with writing, will focus on prioritizing course and assignment goals to respond to and grade student writing. It will offer a repertoire of strategies for giving feedback at various stages of the writing process across a range of media from handwriting to digital audio-video. These include designing...

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences promotional image

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences

Tuesday, October 5, 2021 4:00pm
Virtual

While internships are an established part of professional and science graduate programs, they have been a less common opportunity for humanities graduate students. Now, departments and universities are realizing the many benefits for encouraging humanities graduate students to participate in workplace learning. These experiences provide students with a chance to apply their skills, ranging from archival research to critical analysis, to workplaces outside of the academy. Internships bolster...

Esteban and the Children of the Sun promotional image

Esteban and the Children of the Sun

Sunday, October 3, 2021 3:00pm
The Englert

Esteban and The Children of the Sun is a musical suite that imagines and interprets the tricontinental journey of Esteban of Azemmour, the 16th-century Moroccan explorer and first documented African to travel across the North American lands of present-day southwestern United States.

A multi-media production combining music with dialogue, images and projected text, Esteban and the Children of the Sun follows the 2016 musical project, Hot Tamale Louie, a multi-genre collaboration between composer...

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Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis

Friday, October 1, 2021 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Virtual

The Obermann Center's 2021 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) will take place on Friday, October 1, 2021, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. on Zoom.

Our 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences in three minutes or fewer. The presented research can be a student’s thesis or PhD work, research related to an internship or other outside...

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1

Friday, October 1, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Creating Meaningful Writing Tasks: Breaking Assignments into Smaller Parts

How do we design meaningful formal writing assignments that engage and motivate our students?  How do we use smaller writing-to-learn tasks that scaffold and prepare them for those formal assignments as well as inform us instructors how they are learning what we are teaching?  How do we build multimodal elements into assignments to expand meaning-making opportunities? 

This workshop will focus on designing and...