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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

Jua Kali: Brian Ekdale Mines Lessons from Kenya's Scrappy Gig Economy

Brian Ekdale, a filmmaker and media scholar, is pondering what Kenya’s robust gig economy has to teach us at this moment of global crisis. Jua kali describes the country's scrappy, entrepreneurial network of artisans, manual laborers, and tradespeople who fix things, make small-batch wares, and resell found or wholesale merchandise. The term has evolved to refer to a kind of work culture and ethos...
group of scholars looks at artwork

Working Group Directors Q&A

The Obermann Center's unique Working Groups program provides space, structure, and discretionary funding for participants from across the UI campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a moment when cross-disciplinary collaboration is crucial to address shifting domains of knowledge and a rapidly changing world. We've extended the application deadline for 2020-21 Working Groups to April 28, and...
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Summer 2020 Humanities for the Public Good Interns Selected

The Humanities for the Public Good program welcomes its second cohort of summer interns. The interns, who earn $5,000 for their eight weeks in the field, will work with organizations in the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids corridor on specific projects that range from oral history recording and archiving to curriculum development. In addition to their time at the job site, interns will meet regularly as a...
three scholars in Obermann library

Doing History in Public: Alumni share their work beyond academe

On February 24, three University of Iowa History PhD alumni visited campus to share their current work beyond academe. All three are exemplary scholars who have earned national and campus recognition for their work. In addition to the acclaim they’ve received, what makes these alumni stand out is their work in the public sector: Karen Christianson, whose dissertation explored gender relations in a...
hands full of cash

Surveying the Effects of Political Corruption

Americans may feel they are living in an era of unprecedented political corruption. Just weeks ago, President Trump pardoned eleven people, many of whose convictions included bribery, tax fraud, and the sale of a public office. In the whirl of daily headlines, it can be easy to forget that corruption is nearly as old as democracy itself, with the ancient Greeks and Romans providing many examples...

UI grad student takes home first place for humanities-based Three Minute Thesis competition

UI graduate student Christie Vogler wins the Obermann Center’s first humanities-based Three-Minute Thesis competition with her research on gender archeology, which uncovers the unknown roles of women in Ancient Rome. Read the full article at The Daily Iowan's website: https://dailyiowan.com/2020/02/10/university-of-iowa-grad-student-takes-home-first-place-for-humanities-based-three-minute-thesis...

Recent Events

Out of the Archive: Sara Gómez's De cierta manera (One Way or Another) Film Screening promotional image

Out of the Archive: Sara Gómez's De cierta manera (One Way or Another) Film Screening

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 6:15pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

Please join us at FilmScene this fall for a monthly screening and discussion series, Out of the Archive: Envisioning Blackness. A continuation of conversations begun last spring in the inaugural Out of the Archive program, the series showcases the vibrant, multifaceted tradition of Black cinema by presenting rarely screened and/or recently restored films. Tickets are pay-what-you-can (with students, in particular, encouraged to pick $0). Join us before each screening for a free dinner reception...

Wide Lens: Artificial Intelligence promotional image

Wide Lens: Artificial Intelligence

Thursday, November 30, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

In the past week, you’ve probably asked Google to answer questions, chatted with Siri, rocked out to a new band recommended by Spotify, or asked Chat GPT to produce a first draft of a form letter for you—reminders that our lives are already deeply entwined with artificial intelligence. The term "AI" covers a host of technologies. What connects them? Our very human ambition to create machines that can learn to solve problems. Join us for the next Wide Lens panel as experts from computer science...

Labor Strikes — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Labor Strikes — An Obermann Conversation

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This summer, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) both went on strike, something that hadn’t happened since 1960. These strikes brought Hollywood to a standstill for months and ultimately forced the studios to make major concessions. In September, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union went on strike against the major automakers GM, Ford, and Stellantis. For the first time ever, a sitting president...

Writing for the Humanities workshop promotional image

Writing for the Humanities workshop

Friday, November 17, 2023 12:30pm to 2:30pm
Virtual

This is an online workshop with Professor Eric Hayot (Comparative Literature & Asian Studies, Penn State University), author of one of the most recommended guides to academic writing in the humanities (The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities) and an important commentator on the state of the humanities in general. The workshop welcomes all UI graduate students and faculty interested in practicing and teaching the art and craft of academic writing for the humanities. The event...

Lecture/Discussion featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor Nathan Dize (Washington University-St Louis)

Thursday, November 16, 2023 2:00pm to 3:15pm
Virtual

Lecture/Discussion via zoom featuring award-winning Haitian writer Kettly Mars and Professor and translator, Nathan Dize. Mars’s novel Je suis vivant (2015) and Dize’s translation I am alive (2022) will be discussed. This novel is studied in Professor Curtius's course FREN 4110:0001: Francophone Studies: Literature and the Arts: Haiti. 

Kettly Mars will explore how the 2010 earthquake in Haiti inspired her to write Je suis vivant. Nathan Dize, an Assistant Professor of Francophone Caribbean...

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener promotional image

The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form, A Lecture by Adam Grener

Wednesday, November 15, 2023 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

Please join Adam Grener and the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio on Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 4:30 p.m. in the Franklin Miller Screening Room (AJB E105) for a talk titled, "The Digital Dickens Notes Project: Accessing the Dynamics of Serial Form." Co-Sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the University of Iowa's English Department.

Our featured speaker Adam Grener is Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures and Creative Communication Programme at Te Herenga Waka –...