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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

NHA Advocacy Day

Obermann Director Teresa Mangum joined hundreds of humanities faculty members, center directors, and leaders of professional organizations like the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association in Washington, DC. As part of the annual NHA Advocacy Day, they shared the educational, social, and economic benefits of the arts and humanities. The NHA especially encourages...
Esco in his 20s wearing a suit and bowtie

An Aerial View—Remembering Esco Obermann

Esco Obermann embodied interdisciplinarity. That's him in the photo to the right, upside down on his parents' windmill in Yarmouth, Iowa. (Look closely—the soles of his shoes are aligned with the motor.) Esco, one of nine siblings, grew up doing acrobatics on his family's farm in southeastern Iowa—backbends on bulls, rope stunts in haylofts, L-sits on windmills—as if driven to seek new...
Nina G

Nina G: Stuttering comic walks the line between satire and issue advocacy

Bay Area comedian Nina G works tough territory. She plays gigs at clubs with names like “Nightlife on Mars” and “The Laugh Boat.” She stutters. And she’s really funny about it. While most stand-up comics engage their audiences through relatable stories, Nina G’s work pulls that kind observational humor into the broader intersection of comedy, satire and issue advocacy. That’s tough territory...
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Humanities for the Public Good Seeks Post-Doc, Research Assistant

While we tend to assume one attends graduate school in the humanities to become a professor, deep immersion in anthropology, art, history, literature, philosophy, and other cultural disciplines is excellent preparation for all kinds of workplaces--especially when content is enhanced by competencies sought by a variety of employers. In fall 2018, the University of Iowa received a four-year grant...

Save the date! March 8 Career Diversity in the Humanities Working Symposium

SAVE THE DATE! Career Diversity in the Humanities: An Obermann Humanities for the Public Good Working Symposium March 8 from 9–5 at the Iowa City Public Library Across the country, leaders of PhD programs in the humanities face a conundrum. How can a department honor the subjects, methods, and practices of their disciplines while also preparing graduates for diverse careers? To...
Robert Wise

Nathan Platte's Fascination with the Sounds of an Unassuming Director

Robert Wise doesn’t make sense the same way some directors and their work do. He’s not labyrinthine like Hitchcock or surreal like Lynch. In fact, it’s hard to imagine that some of his films were created by the same person. It is this eclecticism that attracted musicologist Nathan Platte, a faculty member in the School of Music and a Fall 2018 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, to write a book about...

Recent Events

Film Screening of Marshawn Lynch: A History - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

Film Screening of Marshawn Lynch: A History - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21, 2023 7:30pm to 9:30pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

The film screening will be followed with a discussion. 

Marshawn Lynch: A History is a kaleidoscopic look at newly retired NFL star Marshawn Lynch and his use of silence as a form of protest. Culling more than 700 video clips and placing them in dramatic, rapid, and radical juxtaposition, the film is a powerful political parable about the American media-sports complex and its deep complicity with racial oppression. Learn more about the film here.

This event is a part of the Sports, Power, and...

Dr. André Brock, A Mode of Black Life: Afro-Optimism and the Black Digital, Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture

Thursday, September 21, 2023 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

What are the possibilities of Black life beyond liberation, resistance, and oppression? This talk draws upon antiblackness, Black indigeneity, libidinal economy, and science and technology studies to offer a compelling alternative: Afro-Optimism, or the manner in which Black folk build resources to thrive, not just survive, using examples from evocations of Black culture and the Black mundane on Twitter.

André L. Brock is  an associate professor at the School of Literature, Media, and...

'Just 'Bout That Action, Boss: The Televisual Politics and Pleasures of Marshawn Lynch' Keynote Address -  Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

'Just 'Bout That Action, Boss: The Televisual Politics and Pleasures of Marshawn Lynch' Keynote Address - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21, 2023 6:30pm to 7:30pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

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...

Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide promotional image

Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide

Thursday, September 21, 2023 5:30pm
Schaeffer Hall

Join us for a talk by Dr. Elyse Semerdjian, a social historian of the Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on the experiences of women and the empire's Armenian subjects. She has authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) as well as several articles on gender, Ottoman Armenians, urban history, and law in the Ottoman Empire. She has...

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop (2023–24) promotional image

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop (2023–24)

Thursday, September 21, 2023 5:00pm

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books Ends—Obermann/OVPR 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 in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Applications for upcoming Book Ends workshops are due June 7, 2023 and Sept. 21, 2023.

UI Special Collections Open House - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

UI Special Collections Open House - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21, 2023 3:00pm to 4:30pm
University of Iowa Main Library

This open house will display sports-related materials from the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections and the Iowa Women's Archive.

This event is a part of the Sports, Power, and Resistance: Legacies and Futures Obermann Arts and Humanities Symposium. 

Free and open to all.