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

UI Awarded two grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation totaling $1.6 Million

One grant will bring exciting speakers to campus for a yearlong seminar on Latina/o/x identities and cultures; the other will create practice-based, cross-disciplinary opportunities for humanities graduate students interested in diverse careers. The University of Iowa (UI) Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in the Office of the Vice President for Research will host two grants totaling...
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Capturing the Lived Experiences of Latinx High Schoolers

As recipients of a Summer 2018 Interdisciplinary Research Grant, Gerta Bardhoshi (Counselor Education), Leslie Ann Locke (Educational Policy & Leadership), and Jeremy Swanston (Art & Art History) are engaged in a multi-phase project that seeks to give voice to rural Latinx high school students' lived educational experiences, engage in critical dialogue, and promote policy development in the...
Vero Smith

Vero Smith: Making the Museum More Accessible

Jennifer New
Vero Smith is a curator and scholar of architecture who has a passion for making high-level research accessible to the public. As the Associate Curator of the Legacies for Iowa project at the UI Stanley Museum of Art, Smith brings her training in architectural design gained via an MA at the University of Iowa, an MA of Design Studies from Harvard University, and her experience at the Obermann...
Joy Melody Woods

Making Space: Grad Institute alum blogs, podcasts for Black graduate students with mental health issues

Jenna Hammerich
Imagine discovering halfway through your master’s degree that you read at a fourth-grade level. That’s exactly what happened to Joy Melody Woods during her first year in the College of Public Health’s MPH Program. After mentioning to her supervisor that she was having difficulties in some of her classes and struggling to focus on the assigned readings, her supervisor suggested that she be...
Open book with butterflies fluttering above it

Book Ends: New program helps faculty finish book projects

Bringing a book to the finish line of publication is one of the most challenging tasks faced by scholars in disciplines where monographs are the main vehicle for sharing discoveries. At the Obermann Center, we hope to smooth the path by helping create an inspiring, supportive audience of experts for authors in they head into the final stretch of completing a book project....
Digital Bridges logo

Digital Bridges Symposium, August 8-10

With generous support from Grinnell College, the University of Iowa, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College/University of Iowa Partnership's co-directors Erik Simpson (Grinnell) and Teresa Mangum (UI) have worked with students, staff, and faculty in a fascinating, rewarding, and instructive multi-year experience in collaboration....
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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...