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

Dangerous, Smelly, and Covered in Dirt: The Future of Humans in Space promotional image

Dangerous, Smelly, and Covered in Dirt: The Future of Humans in Space

Saturday, April 9, 2022 11:30am to 12:15pm
Macbride Hall

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is a scientist and author. An adjunct assistant professor at Rice University, she studies behavioral manipulation of animal hosts by their parasites. She has worked on systems that infect the brains of fish, and wasps that control the behavior of other wasps before eating them. Dr. Weinersmith and her partner, the cartoonist Zach Weinersmith, coauthored the New York Times bestselling book Soonish.

This talk is part of the 2022 Iowa City Darwin Day Science Fest. All events...

Living, Loving, and Landscapes: How Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Navigate it All. Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu, Yale University promotional image

Living, Loving, and Landscapes: How Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Navigate it All. Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu, Yale University

Saturday, April 9, 2022 10:45am to 11:30am
Macbride Hall

Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and a visiting research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. He uses experimental evolution, mathematical modeling, and computational biology to better understand the underlying causes and consequences of disease. He is a recipient of the UNCF-Merck Award, the Broad Institute Diversity Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

This talk is...

Are Tiny Ancient Algae the Canaries of our Oceans? Dr. Shamar Chin promotional image

Are Tiny Ancient Algae the Canaries of our Oceans? Dr. Shamar Chin

Saturday, April 9, 2022 10:00am to 10:45am
Macbride Hall

Dr. Shamar Chin is Assistant Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Iowa. Dr. Chin is a micropaleontologist, specializing in nannofossils, which she uses to understand climatological and ecological histories.

This talk is part of the 2022 Iowa City Darwin Day Science Fest. All events are free and open to the public.

Picture a Scientist (Free Movie Screening at FilmScene) promotional image

Picture a Scientist (Free Movie Screening at FilmScene)

Friday, April 8, 2022 7:30pm to 10:00pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

Picture a Scientist is a documentary that chronicles the groundswell of researchers who are writing a new chapter for women scientists. Biologist Nancy Hopkins, chemist Raychelle Burks, and geologist Jane Willenbring lead viewers on a journey deep into their own experiences in the sciences, ranging from brutal harassment to years of subtle slights. Along the way, from cramped laboratories to spectacular field stations, we encounter scientific luminaries - including social scientists...

C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale University). The New Tangled Bank: How Ecologies and Interactions Drive Evolution, from Word Games to Proteins. promotional image

C. Brandon Ogbunu (Yale University). The New Tangled Bank: How Ecologies and Interactions Drive Evolution, from Word Games to Proteins.

Friday, April 8, 2022 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Biology Building East

Dr. C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and a visiting research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History. He uses experimental evolution, mathematical modeling, and computational biology to better understand the underlying causes and consequences of disease. He is a recipient of the UNCF-Merck, the Broad Institute Diversity Fellowship and the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

This talk is part of...

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith (Rice University). Zombieland: Real Tales of Parasites Manipulating Host Behavior promotional image

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith (Rice University). Zombieland: Real Tales of Parasites Manipulating Host Behavior

Friday, April 8, 2022 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Biology Building East

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is an author and adjunct assistant professor at Rice University who studies behavioral manipulation of animal hosts by their parasites. She has worked on systems that infect the brains of fish, and wasps that control the behavior of other wasps before eating them. Dr. Weinersmith and her partner, the cartoonist Zach Weinersmith, are coauthors of the New York Times bestselling book Soonish.

This talk is part of the 2022 Iowa City Darwin Day Science Fest. All events are free...