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

Andrew Tubbs: Scholar, musician, disability advocate, comedian

Andrew Tubbs would like to see more researchers recognize the influence that disability has on their work—no matter the field of study. “It’s beneficial for researchers to understand that disability inherently intersects with their work,” Tubbs says. “Being able to come at issues, research questions, and problems from a disability perspective helps nuance arguments.” The University of Iowa...
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...

Recent Events

How Do We Look?: Racial Reckoning through Comics promotional image

How Do We Look?: Racial Reckoning through Comics

Friday, September 9 10:00am to Saturday, September 10, 2022 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This event is part of the 2022-23 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "Racial Reckoning through Comics." In addition to a year-long intensive seminar with local participants, this Sawyer Seminar will feature a series of public presentations by prominent visiting creators and scholars, a film series, workshops, podcasts, and other public events, all of which will critically engage questions of racial representation in the popular international formats of comics.

To begin our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar...

Book Ends Information Session promotional image

Book Ends Information Session

Wednesday, September 7, 2022 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Virtual

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books Ends—an Obermann/OVPR 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 in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books. Read more about the program. 

Interested applicants are invited to learn more about...

E Cram's Book Launch: "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West" promotional image

E Cram's Book Launch: "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West"

Friday, September 2, 2022 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Virtual

In this virtual event, E Cram (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) will read from their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. 

The book deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. Cram redefines sexual modernity through...

A Yellow Rose Project (Exhibition) promotional image

A Yellow Rose Project (Exhibition)

Thursday, September 1 to Friday, September 30, 2022 (all day)
Art Building West

The UI Photography Program, in partnership with the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Gender, and Women’s and Sexuality Studies, welcomes A Yellow Rose Project to the School of Art and Art History. Including work by over 100 women, the project is a photographic collaboration of responses, reflections, and reactions to the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in the United States.

The photographs in this collection express a rich, broad...

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session II promotional image

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session II

Friday, August 12, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently.

Register at writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing 

Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session I promotional image

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session I

Thursday, August 11, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently.

Register at https://writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing

Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...