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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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...

News

Mangum Elected VP of National Humanities Alliance

The Obermann Center is a member of several organizations that advocate for the value of research, including the National Humanities Alliance. The NHA draws members from universities; professional organizations like the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association; and cultural institutions. All were critical in securing renewed...

Healing Arts: Scholar Traces Journey of a 15th-Century Medical Book

Jennifer New
Twice now, art historian Sarah Kyle has visited the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice to study the Roccabonella Herbal, a fifteenth-century illustrated book of plant medicines. Neither the text of the 900-page volume nor its more than 450 images are available digitally, and Kyle is interested in the interplay of the two. “Although the book is extremely fragile,” says the associate professor...

Full audio of Trudy Peterson's keynote lecture on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

On March 1, 2018, Trudy H. Peterson delivered the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorship Keynote Lecture, “Best When Used By: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” as part of the 2018 Provost's Global Forum/Obermann Humanities Symposium, "Against Amnesia: Archives, Evidence, and Social Justice." Listen to the full audio below:

Archives as a Space for Social Justice Is Focus of Provost's Global Forum/Obermann Humanities Symposium

“It is essential to seize the power of archives and use it to hold institutional and government leaders accountable. All aspects of society should be documented, not simply those where power has traditionally resided.” —Randall Jimerson, “Archives for All: Professional Responsibility and Social Justice” Animating the Archives Archives conjure up visions of crumbling files tied with...

Two UI Students Selected as HWW Fellows

Two University of Iowa graduate students have been named as Humanities Without Walls consortium 2018 pre-doctoral workshop fellows. Lydia Maunz-Breese (English, CLAS) and Makayla Steiner (English, CLAS) will be among 30 students from the consortium who will participate in a three-week career diversity workshop in Chicago. Under the leadership of the Chicago Humanities Festival...

First Iowa City Archive Crawl Celebrates Treasures in Local Collections

Hold History in Your Hands at the First-Ever Iowa City Archives Crawl What gems hide in plain sight in Iowa City’s libraries, museums, and archives? At the area’s first-ever archives crawl, visitors can snoop in between the pages of historic diaries, read other people's mail, hold feathers and fossils, and peer into mysteries revealed by historic artifacts like swords and locks of...
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Recent Events

Frequências: Interventions by Janaína Oliveira, Yasmina Price, and Cauleen Smith promotional image

Frequências: Interventions by Janaína Oliveira, Yasmina Price, and Cauleen Smith

Saturday, April 1, 2023 1:00pm to 2:15pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora.

Janaína Oliveira will present "Frequencies of Kalunga." 
Kalunga: a concept originating from Bantu cultures with multiple meanings. For some, the line that marks the limits between the worlds of the living and the ancestors, the line of the horizon and of saudade (longing), which divides but also aggregates. It can also be a portal or the core of the vital energy...

Frequências Screening: Director’s Choice programmed by Christopher Harris promotional image

Frequências Screening: Director’s Choice programmed by Christopher Harris

Saturday, April 1, 2023 10:15am to 12:00pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora.

Christopher Harris makes films and video installations that read African American historiography through the poetics and aesthetics of experimental cinema. His work employs manually and photo-chemically altered appropriated moving images, staged re-enactments of archival artifacts and interrogations of documentary conventions. His current project is a series of...

Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award promotional image

Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora — 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award

Saturday, April 1, 2023 (all day)

2022-23 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora

From March 30 to April 1, "Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora" will feature filmmakers, translators, and film scholars from the Afro-Brazilian diaspora. Organized by Christopher Harris (Cinematic Arts) with partnership from Cristiane Lira (University of Georgia) and Brazilian filmmaker Janaína Oliveira, the...

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: "Black Utopia LP" Performance by Cauleen Smith promotional image

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: "Black Utopia LP" Performance by Cauleen Smith

Friday, March 31, 2023 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Becker Communication Studies Building

This event is part of the 2023 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award: Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora.

Please note that this event has been moved from the Stanley Art Museum to 101 BCSB.

Join us for Cauleen Smith's captivating audio-visual performance, Black Utopia LP. Combining 35mm slide projection with the artist's vinyl LP, this 90-minute "film without film" offers a unique cinematic experience. Emerging from...

Frequências: Interventions by Miryam Charles and Aline Motta promotional image

Frequências: Interventions by Miryam Charles and Aline Motta

Friday, March 31, 2023 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Becker Communication Studies Building

This event is part of the 2023 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora.

Please note that this event has been moved from the Stanley Art Museum to 101 BCSB.

With her artistic practice, Aline Motta (b. 1974, Niterói, Brazil) seeks to point out and fill in the gaps in her own family history as a result of colonial erasure. Her videos, photographs, installations, and performances are based on speculative studies that mix archival...

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: Artist Talk by Aline Motta — "Bridges over the Abyss" promotional image

Frequências Humanities Symposium & IP Major Projects Award: Artist Talk by Aline Motta — "Bridges over the Abyss"

Friday, March 31, 2023 1:15pm to 2:45pm
Stanley Museum of Art

This event is part of the 2023 UI Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Projects Award:. Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora.

Following the opening of Brazilian visual artist Aline Motta’s exhibition at the Stanley Museum, the artist Aline Motta and Brazilian curator and scholar Tatiana Carvalho Costa will share their thoughts on the works exhibited and discuss the uses of speculative fiction and archive to piece together a possible family...