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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

Amal Kassir Writing Workshop: Using Writing as a Tool for Healing promotional image

Amal Kassir Writing Workshop: Using Writing as a Tool for Healing

Friday, April 29, 2022 1:00pm to 2:30pm
North Hall

FREE – SPACE LIMITED TO 12 STUDENTS

SIGN UP: https://bit.ly/AmalWorkshop

Poet Amal Kassir will be taking part in the Anne Frank Tree Planting Ceremony on the UI Pentacrest at 5:00 pm on April 29. Prior to the ceremony, she has offered to lead a writing workshop for students in the School of Social Work.

Join Amal in a brave space, where we will be exploring our own stories for healing that may go beyond us, from within and back! Amal believes we have the capacity to control our narrative...

A Conversation with Amal Kassir: Celebrating Poetree promotional image

A Conversation with Amal Kassir: Celebrating Poetree

Thursday, April 28, 2022 9:30am to 10:30am
Phillips Hall
What Do We Mean by Research Now? Creating Culturally Attuned Teams for Wicked Challenges promotional image

What Do We Mean by Research Now? Creating Culturally Attuned Teams for Wicked Challenges

Friday, April 22, 2022 11:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

What Do We Mean by Research Now? Creating Culturally Attuned Teams for Wicked Challenges

The very acronym STEM assumes that when scientists try to solve complex problems, they work in teams. Only recently, however, have those teams stretched to include artists, humanities scholars, and social scientists. These expansive teams often work with facilitators grounded in the psychology of relationship-building and the recognition that the success of technical solutions is deeply entangled with...

Behind the Big House—Preserving and Interpreting the Material History of Slavery in the U.S. promotional image

Behind the Big House—Preserving and Interpreting the Material History of Slavery in the U.S.

Thursday, April 21, 2022 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Virtual

When residents and tourists visit sites of slavery, whose stories are told? All too often the lives of slaveowners are centered, obscuring the lives of enslaved people. Jodi Skipper’s new book, Behind the Big House, candidly documents her eight-year collaboration with the Behind the Big House program, a community-based model used at local historic sites to address slavery in the collective narrative of U.S. history and culture. As an academic, Skipper also seeks to help other activist scholars...

Deadline: Apply to Develop a Graduate Humanities Lab Course in Summer 2022 promotional image

Deadline: Apply to Develop a Graduate Humanities Lab Course in Summer 2022

Tuesday, April 19, 2022 (all day)

The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good Initiative invites applications from UI faculty and partners to design a Humanities Lab. We define a “Lab” as an applied, experiential approach to teaching and learning that offers graduate students meaningful ways to connect advanced studies in the humanities to both a social challenge and skills valued in multiple career settings. The Lab grant will be awarded to one or more humanities or humanities-adjacent faculty members who, along with...

Publicly Engaged Humanities Graduate Education by Degrees promotional image

Publicly Engaged Humanities Graduate Education by Degrees

Tuesday, April 12, 2022 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Virtual

Across the country, colleges and universities are reimagining humanities graduate education to address students’ commitment to public-facing work and professional development needs. As a result, many institutions have taken steps to tailor humanities pedagogy to meet student demands by creating master’s programs and graduate certificates in Public Humanities. As the University of Iowa Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good Initiative participants design a graduate certificate and...