Upcoming Events

Wide Lens: LISTENING promotional image

Wide Lens: LISTENING

Thursday, May 8, 2025 5:30pm
Voxman Music Building
In a world full of noise, we often try listening to something: conversations with colleagues and family, music in our headphones, videos blasting from our smartphones. We hear all these things daily, but what does it mean to truly listen? In what sense do devices also listen to us? What is the role of silence in listening? How has listening changed over time? Can political tensions be solved through “listening”? How is listening both an art and a science? This Wide Lens event brings together...
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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

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Welcome by Tricia Zebrowski & Douglas Baynton promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Welcome by Tricia Zebrowski & Douglas Baynton

Thursday, April 4, 2019 4:00pm to 4:15pm
Iowa City Public Library
On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...
Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium  promotional image

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Thursday, April 4 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)...
Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium promotional image

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium

Saturday, March 30, 2019 (all day)
University Capitol Centre
Reading and Re-translation" is an international and interdisciplinary colloquium dedicated to the theorization and practice of reading. With funding from an International Programs Major Projects Award, organizers and speakers from around the globe will focus on the current state of research on reading and re-translation and will generate scholarly and creative exchanges between colleagues in diverse fields in the arts, sciences, literatures, and humanities. The conference opens with a special...
Finding Yourself in Academia: A Diné Historian’s Experience promotional image

Finding Yourself in Academia: A Diné Historian’s Experience

Friday, March 29, 2019 1:30pm to 3:00pm
University Capitol Centre
The Graduate History Society welcomes... Dr. Farina King Assistant Professor of History Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Dept Northeastern State University Tahlequah, Oklahoma Dr. Farina King is an assistant professor of history and affiliate of the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Department at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and received her Ph.D. from Arizona, her M.A. in African History from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. from Brigham Young University with a...
Out There:  A Symposium on Provocative Research, Pedagogy, and Academic Freedom promotional image

Out There: A Symposium on Provocative Research, Pedagogy, and Academic Freedom

Friday, March 29, 2019 9:00am to 4:00pm
Old Capitol Museum
Academics and intellectual freedom are increasingly under attack in the United States. This is demonstrated, for example, by the November 2016 launch of the Professor Watchlist by Turning Point USA and the targeted harassment of faculty aimed at intimidating educators and stifling the exchange of ideas and thoughtful debate. This symposium gathers administrators, faculty, and graduate students from across the University of Iowa to discuss the climate currently informing academic life, and to...
Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium promotional image

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium

Friday, March 29 to Saturday, March 30, 2019 (all day)
University Capitol Centre
Reading and Re-translation" is an international and interdisciplinary colloquium dedicated to the theorization and practice of reading. With funding from an International Programs Major Projects Award, organizers and speakers from around the globe will focus on the current state of research on reading and re-translation and will generate scholarly and creative exchanges between colleagues in diverse fields in the arts, sciences, literatures, and humanities. The conference opens with a special...