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...
Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat promotional image

Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat

Monday, May 12 to Friday, May 16, 2025 (all day)
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...
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 Daria Fisher Page, Brian R. Farrell, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will connect regional researchers and professionals who work with rural populations. Participants will collaborate to share their work and develop solutions that address the unique issues faced by rural communities, such as resource extraction, limited investment and digital infrastructure, low quality water and food, and rural-to-urban migration...
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 Daria Fisher Page, Brian R. Farrell, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will connect regional researchers and professionals who work with rural populations. Participants will collaborate to share their work and develop solutions that address the unique issues faced by rural communities, such as resource extraction, limited investment and digital infrastructure, low quality water and food, and rural-to-urban migration...
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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

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...
Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2026) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2026)

Friday, October 24, 2025 11:59pm
111 Church Street
The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 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...

News

Wise and Valiant: Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez celebrates forgotten women authors

While completing a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, Martín López-Vega took a course on the Golden age of Spanish theater. When the class read Valor, agravio y mujer by Ana Caro, López-Vega was shocked. Though he was a native of Spain and had studied literature at the University of Spain, he’d never before heard of Caro. The course, which led him to discover the names and...
Jason Rantanen

Patent Warrior: Jason Rantanen's projects seek to help patents serve people

Early last fall, the Federal Circuit rejected a request from Google to move a patent infringement case involving Google’s YouTube service out of East Texas. The request, formally known as a writ of mandamus, is an attempt at judicial remedy by petitioning an appellate court. In this instance, Google was claiming that East Texas wasn’t the proper venue for the lawsuit. There has been an uptick in...

Black Lives on Screen: Cinematic Arts Offers Semester-Long Series

This spring semester, the Department of Cinematic Arts is hosting an online screening series, Black Lives on Screen, featuring the work of a diverse range of acclaimed African American and Black filmmakers, artists, and scholars. Intended to promote and celebrate the rich history and future of Black cinematic expression, the events will give UI classes, as well as individual students, staff, and...

Cultural Postmortem 2020

How can artists and scholars help the nation contend with the peril in which we find ourselves—starting with our own campuses? The 2020 US presidential race was one of the most politically and ideologically divisive and contentious races that we’ve ever seen. As the events of January 6, 2021 have illustrated, the nation remains divided: political leaders at the highest level are challenging...

New Voices, Refreshing Perspectives: Invite-a-Guest-to-Class Mini Grants

Are you teaching an undergraduate or graduate course that features work by an expert outside the University of Iowa? Do you have a colleague from another institution who could bring a thought-provoking cross-disciplinary perspective to an issue you’re addressing in your course? If you would like to invite a practitioner or expert from the public sector to speak in a course you are teaching this...

Meet the Podcasters! Three UI faculty-podcasters pull back the curtain on their process

Imagine a world without recorded sound. From film soundtracks to car alarms, many of us are so steeped in sound at every moment that we would instantly notice its absence. Since the inception of radio in 1895, we have steadily increased the technology and tools for making and sharing sound. Each step has made it easier and less costly for a person with a microphone and some equipment to capture...

Recent Events

Beyond a Chilling Effect: Direct Action for Academic Freedom promotional image

Beyond a Chilling Effect: Direct Action for Academic Freedom

Thursday, April 3, 2025 4:00pm
Jefferson Building
a Faculty First Responders Workshop sponsored by POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry At a time when academics are finding their work hyper-surveilled, banned from funding, or even scrubbed by AI, how can we vibrantly sustain our research, writing, and creative practice? In this Faculty First Responders workshop, participants will learn concrete steps to support freedom of inquiry for themselves and others. Topics include digital security measures, reducing risk of extremist attacks...
“The Unfinished Symphony”: Graduate and Professional Student Research and Connection Lab  promotional image

“The Unfinished Symphony”: Graduate and Professional Student Research and Connection Lab 

Friday, March 28, 2025 10:30am to 2:30pm
University Capitol Centre
All are welcome to attend this informal symposium designed for graduate and professional students who are in the beginning or the middle of their research to share what they've got to a group of people who are not necessarily well-versed in their discipline. We encourage you to come and talk about your works still in progress, your experiments that are under construction, and where you think all of that might lead (no conclusive data necessary). This is an opportunity to practice sharing your...
Locating Reproductive Justice: Global & Regional Perspectives — 2024–25 Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

Locating Reproductive Justice: Global & Regional Perspectives — 2024–25 Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, March 27 to Friday, March 28, 2025 (all day)
As calls for transnational solidarity among reproductive justice movements emerge, communities are asking how reproductive liberation is tethered to various social movements. Directed by Lina-Maria Murillo (Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies and History) and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies), this symposium brings together scholars and artists with local, regional, and global perspectives to bear on the pursuit of reproductive justice as we...
Discussion of Contraception and American Religion promotional image

Discussion of Contraception and American Religion

Wednesday, March 26, 2025 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Jefferson Building
Join the University of Iowa (UI) Jewish Studies Network, an International Programs affinity group, as they host Samira K. Mehta for a discussion on contraception and American religion. Her forthcoming book, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality, Contraception, and American Religion, examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-20h century to the present. This reading is co-sponsored by the Jewish...
Book Reading by Samira K. Mehta promotional image

Book Reading by Samira K. Mehta

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Prairie Lights Books
Join the University of Iowa (UI) Jewish Studies Network, an International Programs affinity group, as they host Samira K. Mehta for the reading of her book at Prairie Lights Books. Her book, The Racism of People Who Love You, is a collection of essays published by Beacon Press in 2023. These essays integrate cultural criticism and personal experiences about multicultural, multiracial South Asian identity to give voice to multiracial experience and to think robustly about the challenges and...
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...