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...

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News

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...

Relying on the Unreliable: Historian Catherine Stewart Examines 1930s Domestic Workers

Obermann Fellow-in-Residence Catherine Stewart’s current book project, The New Maid, relies in part on a highly unreliable source—student essays. Specifically, Stewart is interested in what is divulged through a cache of papers written by students at a private women’s college in the South in response to the topic, “Negro servants in my household.” Written between 1928 and 1940, the nearly 100...

Recent Events

Info Session: Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop promotional image

Info Session: Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop

Thursday, September 24, 2020 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Join us for this virtual info session/Q&A about the 2021 Humanities Without Walls National Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop (July 19–August 6, 2021). The session will be led by Obermann Center Director Teresa Mangum.

Register via Zoom to receive the meeting link. 

Pandemic, State & Society Webinar Series promotional image

Pandemic, State & Society Webinar Series

Friday, September 18, 2020 8:00pm to 9:30pm
Virtual

Join International Programs, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and the Iowa Global Health Network for a special two-part webinar series "Pandemic, State & Society" (Sept. 18 & 25) bringing together voices from Asia to discuss firsthand experiences with the coronavirus.

Asia was the first place to experience the coronavirus, impose lockdowns, and then emerge from them. It was also the first to experience a resurgence of infection due to the...

Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: A conversation with Katina Rogers

Wednesday, September 16, 2020 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

In her new book, Putting the Humanities PhD to Work (Duke University Press, 2020), Katina Rogers invites readers to build a university that is truly worth fighting for by thinking more expansively about what constitutes scholarly success—not only to support individual career pathways, but also to work toward greater equity and inclusion in the academy. This book grounds practical career advice in a nuanced consideration of the academic workforce, diversity and inclusion, new modes of scholarly...

The Summer Internship for Humanities PhDs: A presentation by HPG interns promotional image

The Summer Internship for Humanities PhDs: A presentation by HPG interns

Tuesday, September 15, 2020 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

Join us as Summer 2020 Humanities for the Public Good interns reflect on their experiences working with Eastern Iowa non-profits and University of Iowa units during Summer 2020. They will share the work they did and connect their learning experiences to their scholarship and future work.

REGISTER via Zoom to receive the meeting link.

Free and open to all.

Humanities Without Walls promotional image

Humanities Without Walls

Thursday, August 27, 2020 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Virtual

The Obermann Center for Advanced studies is proud to be a member of the 16-university Midwest consortium Humanities Without Walls, which is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. On Thursday, August 27, HWW will kick off their 2020-21 career diversity programming. In this virtual roundtable, you’ll hear from three HWW fellowship alumni about their experiences post-fellowship and how the Predoctoral Career Diversity Summer Workshop informed their career exploration and development.

This...

Addressing Equity in the Classroom Setting During Times of Change: Tools for Faculty promotional image

Addressing Equity in the Classroom Setting During Times of Change: Tools for Faculty

Friday, August 21, 2020 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Virtual

Title of Training:  "Addressing Equity in the Classroom Setting During Times of Change: Tools for Faculty"

Training overview:  The Covid-19 pandemic, combined with the nationwide protests following the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, have laid bare the racial disparities that exist in education, healthcare, political participation, and other systems in the United States. These disparities and inequities accompany students as they enter into the learning spaces at the...