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

Street pickers with can carriers in Matanzas, Cuba

Yellow Fever's History of Humans, Microbes, and Ideas

Yellow fever was once a terrifying killer that violently took the lives of half of the people who contracted it. It killed workers building canals, soldiers engaged in sieges, and investors on fact-finding missions. A viral disease spread between humans and primates, it is caused by a species of mosquito that prefers clean, fresh water. Before this was proven decisively in 1901, yellow fever was a...

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...

Recent Events

A Conversation with Scholars At Risk promotional image

A Conversation with Scholars At Risk

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

Join us for a public conversation for faculty, students and staff from across campus about the work of Scholars at Risk to protect and promote academic freedom worldwide. SAR staff representatives Clare Farne Robinson (Director of Advocacy Programs) and Adam Braver (Student Advocacy Seminar Coordinator and Author) will offer remarks on the current state of academic freedom globally, the evolving definition and implementation framework for academic freedom within international law and policy, and...

Radical Hope: Cultural Workers and Community Leaders in Conversation promotional image

Radical Hope: Cultural Workers and Community Leaders in Conversation

Monday, March 3, 2025 6:25pm to 7:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Join Dr. Leigh Patel, Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor, for a panel discussion and conversation with Iowa cultural workers and community leaders.

Dr. Patel is a Professor of Educational Foundation, Organizations and Policy at University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Patel's work focuses on the ways that formal education has consistently acted as one site of coloniality and oppression, and that education and studying is one of the strongest tools for liberation. Political education and...

Book Matters: Brady G’sell and Meena Khandelwal in conversation with Elana Buch promotional image

Book Matters: Brady G’sell and Meena Khandelwal in conversation with Elana Buch

Tuesday, February 25, 2025 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Prairie Lights Books

Join us for a reading and discussion, co-sponsored by Prairie Lights, to celebrate recent works from Brady G’sell and Meena Khandelwal, faculty in the University of Iowa Departments of Anthropology and the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. After the reading, Elana Buch, associate professor of anthropology, will join G’sell and Khandelwal for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Light refreshments will follow.

7-8:30 p.m.
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025
Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St...

Artist Talk with Jerron Herman promotional image

Artist Talk with Jerron Herman

Thursday, February 20, 2025 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Public Space One

Join us for an inspiring conversation with acclaimed choreographer and disabled artist Jerron Herman, an artist compelled to create images of freedom.

Jerron has premiered works at Danspace Project, PSNY, and The Whitney Museum. Jerron has activated museums like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and Guggenheim with daring interdisciplinary installations. Jerron is also the choreographer and co-director of Sensorium Ex, a new opera composed by Paola Prestini with...

Don't Panic! Rethinking How We Frame Difficult Content in the Classroom promotional image

Don't Panic! Rethinking How We Frame Difficult Content in the Classroom

Thursday, February 20, 2025 4:00pm
Phillips Hall

Join us for a conversation about trigger warnings, content alerts, and other approaches to teaching potentially upsetting topics — led by Newell Ann Van Auken, Associate Professor of Instruction, Division of World Languages, Literatures, & Cultures.

Co-hosted by the Center for Language and Culture Learning, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS), and the Chinese Humanities and Arts Workshop (CHAW), an Obermann Working Group.

Jane and Her Music: A Musical Celebration of Jane Austen's 250th Birthday promotional image

Jane and Her Music: A Musical Celebration of Jane Austen's 250th Birthday

Saturday, February 1, 2025 1:30pm to 9:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

Hosted by students and faculty of the School of Music of the University of Iowa, “Jane and Her Music” will provide a unique window into Austen and her times.

Festivities will take place in the historic Senate Chamber of the Old Capitol, evoking the sort of space where Austen herself might have attended a concert. 

All events are FREE and open to all! Please register HERE.

View the program: https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/islandora/object/ui%3A31235

Schedule of Events:

1:30 p.m.: Check-in...