News & Events

Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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)

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

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

Goodbye, Gradate Institute. Hello, Graduate Engagement Corps!

The Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy was started fourteen years ago at a time when public engagement was not a well-known practice on university campuses. More than 200 University of Iowa graduate students have participated in this program, many of them going on to lead or participate in community engaged projects. We count the alumni of this program as friends, many of whom have shared with us the exciting work they are doing in other locales—including in Philadelphia, the Black Hills, and Boulder—and with other organizations, such as NPR, the National Park Service, and our own Center for Teaching. The Institute has also had 11 faculty co-directors who have shared their expertise from fields as disparate as dance and engineering, and with project expertise that ranges from working with incarcerated populations to directing a camp for deaf teens.

John Rapson's Communal Composition: Esteban and the Children of the Sun

Jennifer New

In mid-June, a dozen musicians gathered in the basement of one of Iowa City’s oldest homes. There was a blues guitarist, a French mandole player, and a Celtic fiddler. The drummer was sequestered in the laundry room, and an electric guitarist’s amp was routed through a shower stall to limit distortion. In the midst of it all was John Rapson.

The Kindness of Strangers: Philosopher seeks to make caregiving disparities and their effects visible

Jennifer New

During the pandemic, many of us have relied on the kindness of strangers. The work of people we didn’t know—store clerks, nurses, childcare providers, delivery people, and warehouse workers—allowed many of us to stay home during the past year and a half. As in the case of Blanche DuBois—she of Streetcar Named Desire fame—this reliance may have helped us in the short run, but it’s not necessarily the best societal approach to receiving care. Frontline workers are inordinately female and people of color....

Andrew Boge Reflects on the HWW Career Diversity Workshop

Imagine yourself on the tree-filled University of Michigan campus listening to people with advanced degrees in the humanities talk about their workplaces and career trajectories. One person gives an overview of jobs in university presses, while the next describes her work as a consultant for non-profits. And your task is to soak up information, meet new people, and turn on your imagination.

Seeing Asian American Life through the Video Essay

As each of us ponders how to live and work in the face of growing challenges—from pandemics to racist violence to climate change—scholars and artists are reconsidering their research questions, expanding methodologies, and devising forms for varied audiences. This year, the Obermann Center is hosting a series of informal conversations on research. Artists, scholars, social scientists, and scientists will explore what, in this moment, research can be and can do. We were therefore delighted when Professor Hyaeweol Choi asked if the Obermann Center would join the Korean Studies Research Network in inviting filmmaker, critic, and video essayist Kevin B. Lee to share recent video essays. In this innovative form, Lee illuminates Asian American experience by juxtaposing personal history, popular culture, and journalistic accounts of violence against Asian Americans.

Old, rural public library with wooden door

Training Librarians to Preserve Community Memory

Jenna Hammerich

Over the past two decades, say Micah Bateman and Lindsay Mattock, recipients of a 2021 Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant, library and information science (LIS) graduate programs have privileged information science, data science, and computer science—at several universities even merging with computer science departments—over human- and community-centered practices central to the mission of library and archival sciences. One such practice involves the management of community memory records—everything from genealogical documents to newspaper archives to oral histories. Bateman and Mattock note that at small and rural libraries, these records often go “unmanaged and underused, and reflect only the narratives of majority or dominant populations” because the librarians working with those collections have been largely neglected by LIS training programs that privilege “big data” paradigms.

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Recent Events

Application deadline: Summer 2022 HPG Internships

Monday, February 21, 2022 5:00pm

Experiential learning is a cornerstone of the Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good program. Nine internships are available for summer 2022 for UI PhD students in the humanities or humanities-adjacent disciplines. Interns will spend two summer months working with and for a campus or community partner on a specific project or area of focus. In addition to their work on site, interns also attend weekly cohort meetings and complete assignments that provide professionalizing skills and...

Ukraine and Russia: Deciphering the Current Situation — An Obermann Conversation

Wednesday, February 16, 2022 5:00pm to 6:00pm

Virtual

As the news cycle continues to focus on tensions at the Ukraine-Russia border, we've reached out to three people who know the region well to help us better understand current events and what has led to this situation. In this pop-up Obermann Conversation, we'll hear from:

Daria Kuznetsova — A PhD student in Political Science and a native of Ukraine, Kuznetsova studies democratic transitions and the survival of democracies. For her Masters in Community and Regional Planning from ISU, she focused...

Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure

Friday, February 11, 2022 3:00pm to 4:15pm

Virtual

Join us for a virtual book talk from Hatim El-Hibri, author of Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure.

El-Hibri is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at George Mason University. His research focuses on global and transnational media studies, visual culture studies, Lebanon and the Middle East, urban studies, television studies, and media theory and history.

EXHIBITION SPOTLIGHT: Anne Frank (PT I)

Wednesday, February 9, 2022 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Virtual

The University of Iowa Pentacrest Museums explores current exhibition Let Me Be Myself: The Life Story of Anne Frank through the Exhibition Spotlight program series in a special two-part virtual panel event. Pentacrest Museums Director of Education & Engagement, Carolina Kaufman will moderate discussion with panelists on a variety of related topics to share the story and legacy of Anne Frank and her impact on society. These sessions will illuminate how Frank's story has inspired new approaches...

What Do We Mean by Research Now? — Collaborative Approaches to Understanding Memory and Minds

Monday, February 7, 2022 11:00am to 12:00pm

Virtual

How do scientists gather and sustain teams to understand infinitely complex mysteries—in this case, memory and the mind? And how are our departments, colleges, and disciplinary organizations adapting to the need for such deeply interdisciplinary teams? Join us on February 7, 2022, as a group of researchers from neuroscience, microbiology, and internal medicine share their process, challenges, and suggestions for the future of research.

Panelists:

Ted Abel, Professor, Chair, and DEO of...

Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) Summer Internship Info Session

Friday, February 4, 2022 9:00am to 10:00am

Virtual

Join Associate Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Jennifer New, to learn more about Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) Summer 2022 internship opportunities. Internships are open to UI graduate students pursuing doctoral degrees.

Learn more about the available internships at https://uihumanitiesforthepublicgood.com/summer-2022-internships/.

The info session is free and open to all: https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/91762226223.

Practice-based, cross-disciplinary opportunities for...

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