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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...
HPG logo

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

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities promotional image

Smart Labor and the Fantasy Production of Association for Southeast Asian Nations Smart Cities

Thursday, November 9, 2023 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

What’s so smart about smart cities? In 2018, the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) launched a program to transform 26 pilot cities in the region to “smart cities,” where services and productivity are enhanced by information and communication technology (ICTs) and new modes of governance. Santos examines these smart cities as assemblages of feminized labor which are digitally extracted and distributed from Southeast Asia-based workers to the Global North. Santos analyze how state...

Be on Point with PowerPoint — An Obermann Get It Done workshop promotional image

Be on Point with PowerPoint — An Obermann Get It Done workshop

Wednesday, November 8, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

Do you struggle with how to create an engaging PowerPoint presentation? Are you concerned that your PowerPoint puts people to sleep? What’s the right balance of text and images? What color schemes work best? Come to this Obermann Get It Done workshop with graphic designer and scholar Jeremy Swanston (Associate Professor and DGS, Graphic Design, School of Art and Art History) to learn how to create effective PowerPoints for all kinds of audiences and talks.

Free and open to all, but registration...

Out of the Archive Film Series--Once I Loved: The Experimental Films of Edward Owens promotional image

Out of the Archive Film Series--Once I Loved: The Experimental Films of Edward Owens

Tuesday, November 7, 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...

Places, Spaces, and Landscapes: Video Data Bank and the Moving Image promotional image

Places, Spaces, and Landscapes: Video Data Bank and the Moving Image

Monday, November 6, 2023 1:30pm to 3:20pm
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building

Representing the Video Data Bank, Emily Martin (Distribution Manager) will present on the history, distribution, education and preservation practices of the Chicago based video art collection which is dedicated to fostering the awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its programs. This presentation will also include a screening and discussion of a selection of works from VDB’s collection that respond to the following question: How do...

"Pop and the People: Re-thinking Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series" - Peggy Wang - Visiting Scholar in Art History - School of Art and Art History promotional image

"Pop and the People: Re-thinking Wang Guangyi’s Great Criticism series" - Peggy Wang - Visiting Scholar in Art History - School of Art and Art History

Thursday, October 26, 2023 5:30pm
Art Building West

Wang Guangyi's Great Criticism series escalated to international fame in the 1990s. Cast as a representative of contemporary Chinese art at large, its global renown both emerged from and contributed to tired tropes of political dissidence. This talk looks at what has been oversimplified and missed in readings of these iconic images.  By uncovering new meanings for these works, this talk considers the broader stakes of interpretation in a Western-centered global art world. (Image credit: Wang...

Application Deadline: Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium Director (2024–25) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium Director (2024–25)

Wednesday, October 25, 2023 5:00pm

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 Arts & Humanities Symposium!

These imaginative half- and whole-day symposia connect the arts and humanities with design, politics, health sciences, environmental studies, technology, and other disciplines via a compelling topic...