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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

“He is remarkable for…wearing a Handkerchief tied round his Head”: Resistance as Escape and Cultural Retention in the Canadian Fugitive Slave Archive - Zoom Lecture - Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson - School of Art and Art History promotional image

“He is remarkable for…wearing a Handkerchief tied round his Head”: Resistance as Escape and Cultural Retention in the Canadian Fugitive Slave Archive - Zoom Lecture - Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson - School of Art and Art History

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 5:00pm
Virtual

Bio:
Charmaine A. Nelson is a Provost Professor of Art History in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and Director of the Slavery North Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2020-2022, she was a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD) University in Halifax, Canada, where she founded the first-ever institute focused on the study of Canadian Slavery. She also...

"Racial Reckoning through Comics" closing event with the Hernandez Bros. promotional image

"Racial Reckoning through Comics" closing event with the Hernandez Bros.

Friday, April 14, 2023 10:00am to 6:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Please join us for our last event with some of the most influential artists today, “the Hernandez Bros,” together with Natalia Hernandez and scholars Qiana Whitted (University of South Carolina) and Darieck Scott (UC Berkeley). We will enjoy our guests’ presentations at the Iowa City Public Library as well as a variety of events. On Friday, we will play the Love and Rockets: The Great American Comic Book at Filmscene, a documentary that celebrates 40 years of the artists’ career. This is part of...

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2023–24) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2023–24)

Tuesday, April 11, 2023 5:00pm

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 explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals. 

This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a moment when cross...

Out of the Archive: Black Women Behind the Lens — Zeinabu irene Davis's CYCLES (1989) and COMPENSATION (1999) -- Pre-Screening Drinks/Dessert Reception & Post-Screening Conversation promotional image

Out of the Archive: Black Women Behind the Lens — Zeinabu irene Davis's CYCLES (1989) and COMPENSATION (1999) -- Pre-Screening Drinks/Dessert Reception & Post-Screening Conversation

Monday, April 10, 2023 6:30pm to 9:45pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

This special program, part of OUT OF THE ARCHIVE: BLACK WOMEN BEHIND THE LENS, will feature two films by Zeinabu irene Davis. Davis's Compensation (1999), her debut feature film, presents two unique African-American love stories between a Deaf woman and a hearing man. Inspired by a poem written by Paul Laurence Dunbar, this moving narrative shares their struggle to overcome racism, disability and discrimination. An important film on African-American Deaf culture, Davis incorporates silent film...

Dr. Kim TallBear: The Vanishing Indian Speaks Back: Race, Genomics, and Indigenous Rights promotional image

Dr. Kim TallBear: The Vanishing Indian Speaks Back: Race, Genomics, and Indigenous Rights

Saturday, April 8, 2023 11:30am to 12:15pm
Phillips Hall

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) (she/her) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast...

Oddball Science: Why Studies of Weird Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial. Dr. Patricia Brennan, Mt. Holyoke College promotional image

Oddball Science: Why Studies of Weird Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial. Dr. Patricia Brennan, Mt. Holyoke College

Saturday, April 8, 2023 10:45am to 11:30am
Phillips Hall

Patricia (Patty) Brennan is interested in the morphological evolution of genital morphology in vertebrates and the mechanisms that drive genital diversification, sexual conflict in particular. She has a BSc in Marine Biology from her native Colombia, where she studied the cardiac physiology of marine mammals. She went on to work in the Galapagos Islands aboard a research vessel (R/V Odyssey). Brennan completed her PhD dissertation at Cornell University, where she studied the breeding biology and...