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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

Christie Vogler

First Humanities 3-Minute Thesis Winner Crowned

Making a case for the presence of a female medical practitioner working out of a villa in Sicily, circa 1-3 A.D., anthropology PhD candidate Christie Vogler wowed the judges and the crowd at the first-ever Humanities 3MT competition on September 27. The Obermann Center hosted the event to celebrate and share the work of the UI's humanities graduate students, and to give them a chance to practice...

A Clown Walks Into the Matrix...

Or how one group is searching for the holy grail of live entertainment Paul Kalina is wearing a suit that has three kinds of technology embedded in it. He is a clown who has performed bedside for kids in hospitals and on the barest of stages. But in June 2019 he is in Prague for the world’s largest festival of theater and stage design, the PQ—or Prague Quadrennial. He is going on stage...

Why You – Yes, YOU Who Is Only Partway into a Dissertation and Who Doesn’t Have Time – Need to Do the Humanities 3MT!

There was one humanities finalist in last year’s University of Iowa 3MT competition--Miriam Janechek. She was in the midst of writing her English literature dissertation about 19th-century Victorian children’s literature and religion, while simultaneously caring for a baby and a toddler and living in St. Paul, MN. It would have been easy for her to view the competition, in which participants...

Executive Directors of MLA, AHA to Participate in Humanities Career Diversity Symposium

On September 13 and 14, 2019, Paula Krebs and Jim Grossman—executive directors of the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association, respectively—will join other national leaders of engaged graduate education for a UI-led symposium on public scholarship, experiential learning, and humanities graduate education. University of Iowa PhD students who participated in this summer's...

Relying on the Unreliable: Historian Catherine Stewart Examines 1930s Domestic Workers

Obermann Fellow-in-Residence Catherine Stewart’s current book project, The New Maid, relies in part on a highly unreliable source—student essays. Specifically, Stewart is interested in what is divulged through a cache of papers written by students at a private women’s college in the South in response to the topic, “Negro servants in my household.” Written between 1928 and 1940, the nearly 100...
Ashley Cheyemi McNeil

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil Appointed 2019-21 HPG Postdoctoral Scholar

Interdisciplinary scholar Dr. Ashley Cheyemi Rae McNeil has been appointed the 2019–2021 Postdoctoral Scholar for the Andrew W. Mellon–Funded Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) initiative. McNeil earned her bi-national PhD in English from Georgia State University and in American Studies from the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. As...

Recent Events

Sports, Power, and Resistance: Legacies and Futures — Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

Sports, Power, and Resistance: Legacies and Futures — Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21 to Saturday, September 23, 2023 (all day)

How can the history of activism in sports help us understand the dynamics shaping conflicts today? How might labor relations in sport be imagined differently? How does the structure of sporting entertainment provide opportunities and obstacles to activism, and how can activists navigate these challenges?

As fans flock to sports arenas to cheer for their favorite teams, these spaces are simultaneously important societal battlegrounds. From acts of political protest by players to legislative...

Black Online Culture, Blackfishing, and Digital Blackface and Welcoming Reception for Dr. André Brock, an Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor

Wednesday, September 20, 2023 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Please join us in welcoming Dr. André Brock with a receiption at the Iowa City Public Library the day before his talk on campus. There will be a talk by Dr. Brock at 6 p.m., followed by a reception at the Library at 7 p.m. Food & beverages will be provided: light appetizers, dessert, nonalcoholic beverages.

André L. Brock is  an associate professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an MA in English and Rhetoric from...

Creative Matters: Attacca Quartet and Caroline Shaw in Conversation with Elizabeth Oakes promotional image

Creative Matters: Attacca Quartet and Caroline Shaw in Conversation with Elizabeth Oakes

Tuesday, September 19, 2023 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Voxman Music Building

Join us in Voxman Recital Hall for an intimate and engaging conversation with the Grammy-award winning Attacca Quartet and Caroline Shaw, youngest-ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Elizabeth Oakes, professor of instruction in chamber music in the UI School of Music, will moderate the talk. The event is free and open to the public.

The members of the acclaimed Attacca Quartet—described by The New York Times as “exuberant, funky, and … exactingly nuanced”—are passionate advocates...

Creating Engaging Event Communications Plans — An Obermann Get It Done Workshop promotional image

Creating Engaging Event Communications Plans — An Obermann Get It Done Workshop

Tuesday, September 19, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
111 Church Street

Are you planning academic events—symposiums, conferences, or public lectures—and don’t know where to start with your communications strategy? Where are the best places to publicize your event around the UI campus and Iowa City? What tools should you use? Join Lauren Cox (Assistant Director, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies) and Jenna Hammerich (Communications Specialist, Obermann Center for Advanced Studies) for an in-person Get It Done Workshop to learn about strategic communications for...

Humanities in Medicine: Dr. Liana Meffert promotional image

Humanities in Medicine: Dr. Liana Meffert

Monday, September 18, 2023 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Medical Education Research Facility

Reception will follow. Event is free and open to the public, but please register here

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Spring 2024) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Spring 2024)

Tuesday, September 12, 2023 5:00pm

Obermann Center Faculty Fellows (formerly Fellows-in-Residence) fully devote themselves to projects within an interdisciplinary community. The program supports artists, researchers, and scholars during periods when focus and feedback are crucial. The program is rooted in our mission: to support the work of individual scholars, while also providing Fellows with the opportunity to enrich an individual, discipline-specific project through interdisciplinary exchanges with a lively intellectual...