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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

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

How Do We Look?: Racial Reckoning through Comics promotional image

How Do We Look?: Racial Reckoning through Comics

Friday, September 9 10:00am to Saturday, September 10, 2022 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This event is part of the 2022-23 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "Racial Reckoning through Comics." In addition to a year-long intensive seminar with local participants, this Sawyer Seminar will feature a series of public presentations by prominent visiting creators and scholars, a film series, workshops, podcasts, and other public events, all of which will critically engage questions of racial representation in the popular international formats of comics.

To begin our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar...

Book Ends Information Session promotional image

Book Ends Information Session

Wednesday, September 7, 2022 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Virtual

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books Ends—an 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. Read more about the program. 

Interested applicants are invited to learn more about...

E Cram's Book Launch: "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West" promotional image

E Cram's Book Launch: "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West"

Friday, September 2, 2022 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Virtual

In this virtual event, E Cram (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) will read from their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. 

The book deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. Cram redefines sexual modernity through...

A Yellow Rose Project (Exhibition) promotional image

A Yellow Rose Project (Exhibition)

Thursday, September 1 to Friday, September 30, 2022 (all day)
Art Building West

The UI Photography Program, in partnership with the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Gender, and Women’s and Sexuality Studies, welcomes A Yellow Rose Project to the School of Art and Art History. Including work by over 100 women, the project is a photographic collaboration of responses, reflections, and reactions to the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in the United States.

The photographs in this collection express a rich, broad...

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session II promotional image

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session II

Friday, August 12, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently.

Register at writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing 

Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session I promotional image

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session I

Thursday, August 11, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently.

Register at https://writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing

Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...