Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants promotional image

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Thursday, April 1, 2027 5:00pm
111 Church Street

This new Obermann Center program offers modest yet swift support for those portions of research and creative endeavors by UI scholars that are important toward advancing a project but do not have enough funding from other sources. We will grant 10 awards of $500 or less per academic year. Note that funds need to be spent by June 30 of each year.

Eligibility: Open to all University of Iowa faculty and staff researchers who have not received a SIP award in the past academic year.

Application...

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...

Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Thursday, May 31, 2029 (all day)
111 Church Street

Books Ends—Obermann 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 turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis.

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News

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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...
What Can Museums Become? logo

Activating the Museum

March Humanities Symposium to Explore Future of Museums When you think about museums, what comes to mind? Many of us picture an imposing building with artworks and artifacts displayed among velvet ropes, marble columns, and guards who shush you. But there are many possibilities for museums, and the two directors of this spring’s Obermann Humanities Symposium, “What Can Museums Become?”, Joyce Tsai...
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Imagining Latinidades Offers Full Slate This Spring

The second half of the year-long Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar Imagining Latinidades welcomes a full slate of speakers to campus this spring. After hosting an opening conference and two short symposia in the fall, in addition to commencing a podcast, the Seminar’s directors—Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (Latina/o Studies and Communication Studies), Rene Rocha (Political Science and Latina/o Studies)...
Jean Gordon

Lost Language Found: Gordon Develops Tool to Improve Aphasia Diagnosis

How would you feel if, in the middle of a conversation, you couldn’t come up with the word for water, shirt, or table—or your own name? If suddenly it was a struggle to comment on a movie or tell a simple story? You’d likely feel confused, embarrassed, frustrated, scared. According to the National Aphasia Association, over two million Americans suffer from aphasia—the inability to speak, write...

It All Depends on 31 Syllables: A Study of the Power of Japan's Medieval Waka

Imagine if your social stature and your livelihood were dependent on your ability to write poetry and refer to the work of other poets. If there were poetry competitions among the elite that decided one’s worthiness. Or if the entire direction of a nation could be changed via 31 syllables. Japanese waka, a 31-syllable precursor to haiku, held just this kind of sway for several centuries...

Recent Events

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation

Monday, October 18, 2021 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Virtual

For several generations, Anne Frank has been a household name—the WWII diarist whose posthumously published book has been translated into more than 70 languages. But do younger generations know her story? When they encounter her, what resonates with them?

In this conversation, we'll consider Anne's legacy and the ways her experience as a refugee, a person in hiding, an advocate for human rights, and a joyful creative spirit can speak to new generations.

Speakers will include:

Kirsten Kumpf...
Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2

Friday, October 8, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

How do we respond to and evaluate student writing, including multimodal work, without overwhelming ourselves and our students? This session, the second in a series of two workshops on teaching with writing, will focus on prioritizing course and assignment goals to respond to and grade student writing. It will offer a repertoire of strategies for giving feedback at various stages of the writing process across a range of media from handwriting to digital audio-video. These include designing...

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences promotional image

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences

Tuesday, October 5, 2021 4:00pm
Virtual

While internships are an established part of professional and science graduate programs, they have been a less common opportunity for humanities graduate students. Now, departments and universities are realizing the many benefits for encouraging humanities graduate students to participate in workplace learning. These experiences provide students with a chance to apply their skills, ranging from archival research to critical analysis, to workplaces outside of the academy. Internships bolster...

Esteban and the Children of the Sun promotional image

Esteban and the Children of the Sun

Sunday, October 3, 2021 3:00pm
The Englert

Esteban and The Children of the Sun is a musical suite that imagines and interprets the tricontinental journey of Esteban of Azemmour, the 16th-century Moroccan explorer and first documented African to travel across the North American lands of present-day southwestern United States.

A multi-media production combining music with dialogue, images and projected text, Esteban and the Children of the Sun follows the 2016 musical project, Hot Tamale Louie, a multi-genre collaboration between composer...

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis

Friday, October 1, 2021 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Virtual

The Obermann Center's 2021 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) will take place on Friday, October 1, 2021, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. on Zoom.

Our 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences in three minutes or fewer. The presented research can be a student’s thesis or PhD work, research related to an internship or other outside...

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1

Friday, October 1, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Creating Meaningful Writing Tasks: Breaking Assignments into Smaller Parts

How do we design meaningful formal writing assignments that engage and motivate our students?  How do we use smaller writing-to-learn tasks that scaffold and prepare them for those formal assignments as well as inform us instructors how they are learning what we are teaching?  How do we build multimodal elements into assignments to expand meaning-making opportunities? 

This workshop will focus on designing and...