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

Black Curators' Roundtable Examines Changing Practices

This Friday's Black Curators' Roundtable is a first chance to hear some of the issues that will be central to the 2019–20 Obermann Humanities Symposium, What Can Museums Become? Led by trans poet, artist, curator, and UI alumnus Anaïs Duplan (pictured above), the event gathers three others curators to discuss their practices and trends. Facilitated by Duplan, founding curator for the Center...
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...

Recent Events

Wide Lens: WATER - interdisciplinary research exchange & conviviality at the Stanley Museum of Art promotional image

Wide Lens: WATER - interdisciplinary research exchange & conviviality at the Stanley Museum of Art

Thursday, December 1, 2022 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

Inspiration & exchange across the disciplines

For each gathering in the new Wide Lens series, scholars and/or artists from across the university will briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest (pecha kucha–style), and then open the floor to questions and discussion over food and drink at the ever-inspiring Stanley Museum of Art.

Wide Lens is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for...

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament promotional image

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

Quality childcare is an elemental need. It allows parents to work at paid jobs, which in turn helps to support the economic well-being of our communities. Equally as crucial, it provides early childhood development for the next generation.

Anyone who has tried to find quality childcare, however, knows that it is not easy to find—or very affordable. In the past five years, Iowa has lost more than a third of its childcare providers, and the cost of child care amounts to 15.3% of the average Iowa...

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried promotional image

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

British lawyer Alexander McLean, the founder of Justice Defenders (formerly African Prisons Project), will discuss his work transforming communities, justice systems, and countries from inside out. Sponsored by the UI Lecture Committee, Center for Human Rights, College of Education, School of Music, International Programs, Citizen Lawyer Program, and Obermann Center supported Prison Writing Project.

The event will also be livestreamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Dq6K-wUjE 

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America" promotional image

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"

Friday, November 11, 2022 2:30pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

UPCOMING POROI SEMINAR (!)
Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"
 
Dr. Vázquez will be circulating the introduction to his book, States of Defeat, for us to workshop with him! He writes, “After over a century of international political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked on the twenty-first century and discerned that revolutionary struggle, previously an instrument for seizing an emancipated future, had somehow run aground. My book, States of...

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics promotional image

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics

Friday, November 4 10:30am to Saturday, November 5, 2022 4:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

To continue our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar devoted to “Racial Reckoning Through Comics,” we turn to critical and creative approaches to representing historical as well as potential futures of racial trauma, testimony, possibility, and expanded narrative. How have comics neglected as well as addressed racialized histories or imagined racialized futures? In addition to presentations from our dynamic speakers, this event will include a guided archival tour of rare comics artifacts from the...

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop promotional image

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 5:00pm

Launched in 2015 as an initiative of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, this annual workshop welcomes 30 participants each summer from higher education institutions across the United States. HWW Summer Workshop Fellows work in a variety of academic disciplines. They are scholars and practitioners who bring experience in community building, museum curation, filmmaking, radio programming, social media, project management, research, writing, and teaching. They are invested in issues of...