Upcoming Events

NEA Big Read | Free Book Pick Up promotional image

NEA Big Read | Free Book Pick Up

Monday, January 20, 9:00am to Wednesday, February 12, 2025 5:00pm
Stanley Museum of Art
The Stanley Museum of Art will launch its National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program on Jan. 20, 2025, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This event features a community wide reading of the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. Pick up a free copy of Beloved at 12 pickup locations across Iowa City between Jan. 20 and Feb. 12, 2025.  Register here to pickup a free copy: https://uiowa.doubleknot.com/event/nea-big-reads-beloved-by-toni-morriso... An email confirmation must be presented to claim a book...
Don't Panic! Rethinking How We Frame Difficult Content in the Classroom promotional image

Don't Panic! Rethinking How We Frame Difficult Content in the Classroom

Thursday, February 20, 2025 4:00pm
Phillips Hall
Join us for a conversation about trigger warnings, content alerts, and other approaches to teaching potentially upsetting topics — led by Newell Ann Van Auken, Associate Professor of Instruction, Division of World Languages, Literatures, & Cultures. Co-hosted by the Center for Language and Culture Learning, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS), and the Chinese Humanities and Arts Workshop (CHAW), an Obermann Working Group.
Artist Talk with Jerron Herman promotional image

Artist Talk with Jerron Herman

Thursday, February 20, 2025 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Public Space One
Join us for an inspiring conversation with acclaimed choreographer and disabled artist Jerron Herman, an artist compelled to create images of freedom.
Book Matters: Brady G’Sell and Meena Khandelwal in conversation with Elana Buch promotional image

Book Matters: Brady G’Sell and Meena Khandelwal in conversation with Elana Buch

Tuesday, February 25, 2025 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Prairie Lights Books
Join us for a reading and discussion, co-sponsored by Prairie Lights, to celebrate recent works from Brady G’Sell and Meena Khandelwal, faculty in the University of Iowa Department of Anthropology and the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program. After the reading, Elana Buch, associate professor of anthropology, will join G’Sell and Khandelwal for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Light refreshments will follow.
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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2025) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Fall 2025)

Saturday, February 15, 2025 11:59pm
The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is currently accepting applications for its new International Fellowships Program, which 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

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 5:00pm
Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends—Obermann/OVPR 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: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat

Friday, March 14, 2025 5:00pm
Have you been waiting all school year to make serious progress on your book manuscript, article, or grant application? Jump-start your summer writing project at the Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat May 12–16, 2025! Fifteen participants will enjoy a week of quiet productivity apart from the distractions of campus at the beautiful North Ridge Pavilion in Coralville. Daily catered lunches will provide an opportunity for exchange and discussion with other writers across campus. Each day will...
Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2025–26) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2025–26)

Wednesday, April 9, 2025 5:00pm
Obermann Center Working Groups provide space, structure, and discretionary funding ($500 per year for 3 years) 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 explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals. This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a...
Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 5:00pm
Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends—Obermann/OVPR 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. Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three...

News

The Anne Frank Tree: Taking Root in Iowa, 2021-22

The Anne Frank Tree: Taking Root in Iowa

On April 29, 2022, the University of Iowa will welcome a remarkable new tree to the Pentacrest: a sapling propagated from the old chestnut tree that grew behind the Amsterdam annex where Anne Frank and her family hid during World War II. Although the tree died a number of years ago--at an estimated 170 years old--it lives on through saplings that have been planted in such as places as the Boston...
Tracie Morris

Black Spring: Tracie Morris asks, "How did we get to here and where do we go from here?"

As the culminating event in the Black Lives on Screen series that has spanned the spring semester, Tracie Morris (Iowa Writers' Workshop) is presenting a short filmic work with performance voice-over. Black Spring (in 5 parts) is cultural theory, cinema, poetry, protest art, and elegy. Like much of Morris's work, it is a hybrid that is not easily categorized. Resisting categories Morris is a poet...

Thinking in Images: The Evolution of Rachel Williams

“I had to think in images.” This is how Rachel Williams explains her progression as the artist-author of two graphic histories who moved from illustrating the words of others to bringing a story to life on her own terms. A painter and art educator by training, Williams’s approach has always been multi-disciplinary. For her recently published books, Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The...

Cathy Park Hong Gives UI Keynote

In the first chapter of Cathy Park Hong’s creative nonfiction book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), the reader is transported to Kalamazoo, where Hong gave a reading from an early draft of her book at Western Michigan University. At the end of the event some fans approach her, eager to share gratitude for her work and express how personal it is to them. Two audience...
Imagining Latinidades podcast logo

Sawyer Seminar Culminates with Latina/o/x Futurity

When COVID-19 interrupted the late spring events and culmination of the yearlong Mellon Sawyer Seminar Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging, we didn't know that the events would eventually end up online and across institutions. In 2019–20, seminar co-directors Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, Ariana Ruiz, and Rene Rocha worked across disciplines to organize six symposia, a film series...

Signing Music, Gender in The Iliad, and Civil Rights Performance: Three faculty receive book completion awards

Three UI faculty have received Book Ends awards to complete manuscripts. A jointly sponsored opportunity of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends supports faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award, which is now in its third year, is designed to help faculty members...

Recent Events

Writing for the Humanities workshop promotional image

Writing for the Humanities workshop

Friday, November 17, 2023 12:30pm to 2:30pm
Virtual
Writing for the Humanities Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty with Professor Eric Hayot (Comparative Literature & Asian Studies, Penn State University).

Lecture/Discussion featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor Nathan Dize (Washington University-St Louis)

Thursday, November 16, 2023 2:00pm to 3:15pm
Virtual
Lecture/Discussion featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor and translator Nathan Dize (Washington University-St Louis). Mars’s novel "Je suis vivant" (2015) and Dize’s translation "I am alive" (2022) will be discussed along with Haitian literature and the arts. The conversation will be in French and in English.
The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener promotional image

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
Adam Grener presents the Digital Dickens Notes Project.
Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities promotional image

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities

Thursday, November 9, 2023 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
What’s so smart about smart cities? In 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) launched a program to transform 26 pilot cities in the region to “smart cities,” where services and productivity are enhanced by information and communication technology (ICTs) and new modes of governance.
Be on Point with PowerPoint — An Obermann Get It Done workshop promotional image

Be on Point with PowerPoint — An Obermann Get It Done workshop

Wednesday, November 8, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual
Do you struggle with how to create an engaging PowerPoint presentation? Are you concerned that your PowerPoint puts people to sleep? What’s the right balance of text and images? What color schemes work best? Come to this Obermann Get It Done workshop with graphic designer and scholar Jeremy Swanston (Associate Professor and DGS, Graphic Design, School of Art and Art History) to learn how to create effective PowerPoints for all kinds of audiences and talks. Free and open to all, but registration...
Out of the Archive Film Series--Once I Loved: The Experimental Films of Edward Owens promotional image

Out of the Archive Film Series--Once I Loved: The Experimental Films of Edward Owens

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 6:15pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)
Please join us at FilmScene this fall for a monthly screening and discussion series, Out of the Archive: Envisioning Blackness. A continuation of conversations begun last spring in the inaugural Out of the Archive program, the series showcases the vibrant, multifaceted tradition of Black cinema by presenting rarely screened and/or recently restored films. Tickets are pay-what-you-can (with students, in particular, encouraged to pick $0). Join us before each screening for a free dinner reception...