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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Summer 2026 Obermann Writing Collective promotional image

Application Deadline: Summer 2026 Obermann Writing Collective

Friday, May 22, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

This program offers accountability to artists, scholars, and researchers working on any kind of writing project (articles, essays, fellowship or grant applications, dissertations, book projects, edited volumes, etc.) who want dedicated time, a cozy space, and a community for the practice of writing.Each group meets once a week for 1.5 hours. Weekly writing sessions include brief check-ins, goal setting, and sustained writing time. All groups are open to everyone in the University of Iowa...

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 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...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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...

News

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...
Rhondda Robinson Thomas

Book Talk with Rhondda Robinson Thomas, author of Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community , Nov. 30

In the summer of 2007, a young scholar named Rhondda Robinson Thomas attended a new faculty orientation at Clemson University. Thomas was unfamiliar with Clemson, which is a public, land-grant research university in South Carolina, and was surprised to learn that the campus was built on the site of American statesman John C. Calhoun and Floride Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation. In fact, their home...
Green, Fair, & Prosperous book cover

Planning Scholar Suggests Iowa Is at a Crossroads, and Proposes a Path Forward

In 1900, Iowa was the tenth largest state in the country. A hundred years later, it was the thirtieth largest and had experienced the biggest decline in its population rank of any state. Today, Iowa is at a crossroads. Its population is more urban, less white, and more environmentally challenged than its longtime reputation suggests. In a new book, Green, Fair, and Prosperous: Paths to a...

Recent Events

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament promotional image

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

Quality childcare is an elemental need. It allows parents to work at paid jobs, which in turn helps to support the economic well-being of our communities. Equally as crucial, it provides early childhood development for the next generation.

Anyone who has tried to find quality childcare, however, knows that it is not easy to find—or very affordable. In the past five years, Iowa has lost more than a third of its childcare providers, and the cost of child care amounts to 15.3% of the average Iowa...

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried promotional image

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

British lawyer Alexander McLean, the founder of Justice Defenders (formerly African Prisons Project), will discuss his work transforming communities, justice systems, and countries from inside out. Sponsored by the UI Lecture Committee, Center for Human Rights, College of Education, School of Music, International Programs, Citizen Lawyer Program, and Obermann Center supported Prison Writing Project.

The event will also be livestreamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Dq6K-wUjE 

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America" promotional image

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"

Friday, November 11, 2022 2:30pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

UPCOMING POROI SEMINAR (!)
Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"
 
Dr. Vázquez will be circulating the introduction to his book, States of Defeat, for us to workshop with him! He writes, “After over a century of international political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked on the twenty-first century and discerned that revolutionary struggle, previously an instrument for seizing an emancipated future, had somehow run aground. My book, States of...

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics promotional image

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics

Friday, November 4 10:30am to Saturday, November 5, 2022 4:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

To continue our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar devoted to “Racial Reckoning Through Comics,” we turn to critical and creative approaches to representing historical as well as potential futures of racial trauma, testimony, possibility, and expanded narrative. How have comics neglected as well as addressed racialized histories or imagined racialized futures? In addition to presentations from our dynamic speakers, this event will include a guided archival tour of rare comics artifacts from the...

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop promotional image

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 5:00pm

Launched in 2015 as an initiative of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, this annual workshop welcomes 30 participants each summer from higher education institutions across the United States. HWW Summer Workshop Fellows work in a variety of academic disciplines. They are scholars and practitioners who bring experience in community building, museum curation, filmmaking, radio programming, social media, project management, research, writing, and teaching. They are invested in issues of...

Translating Research into Graphic Forms — A Discussion

Friday, October 28, 2022 3:30pm
Virtual

The Creative and Critical Practice and Pedagogy Obermann Working Group is exploring the potential of creative dissertations Friday, Oct. 28 at 3:30 p.m. on Zoom. They’re reading three online articles by Nick Sousanis, Professor at San Francisco State University and the first of a growing number of scholars translating research into graphic forms. 

Free and open to all. For the Zoom link and links to the readings, please contact the group's co-directors, Professor Harry Stecopoulos (harilaos...