Upcoming Events

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 Department of Anthropology and the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program. 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.
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...
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...
Writing for The Conversation: Graduate Students promotional image

Writing for The Conversation: Graduate Students

Thursday, March 6, 2025 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual
Join the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Graduate College for a virtual introduction to The Conversation US with Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Associate Vice President for Research.  The Conversation is an independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of academic experts for the public good. With a monthly readership of 20 million, The Conversation expertly shares a scholar’s expertise far beyond the borders of our state. Articles are geared toward the general...
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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat

Friday, March 14, 2025 5:00pm
Have you been waiting all school year to make serious progress on your book manuscript, article, or grant application? Jump-start your summer writing project at the Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat May 12–16, 2025! Fifteen participants will enjoy a week of quiet productivity apart from the distractions of campus at the beautiful North Ridge Pavilion in Coralville. Daily catered lunches will provide an opportunity for exchange and discussion with other writers across campus. Each day will...
Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2025–26) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2025–26)

Wednesday, April 9, 2025 5:00pm
Obermann Center Working Groups provide space, structure, and discretionary funding ($500 per year for 3 years) 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 explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals. This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a...
Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 5:00pm
Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book Ends—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. Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three...

News

A Letter to the Obermann Community

A Letter to Our Colleagues, Collaborators, and Friends The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies was founded on the belief that what makes colleges and universities invaluable and irreplaceable is that they bring people together for the express purpose of expanding horizons, using research and debate to test assumptions and claims, solving problems, and forming the habit of lifelong learning. At...
Man stretching animal hide for book

Sawyer Mellon Seminar Maps Cultural Exchanges Across Eurasia

International Scholars and Book Conservators Explore Premodern Texts Thousands of years before the advent of print, texts were recorded in manuscript form--written out by hand on papyrus, parchment, paper, silk, bamboo, or other materials. Scholars involved in the 2016-17 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at the University of Iowa are renewing their examination of these early texts, asking such questions...
The Taming poster

Riverside Theatre Talkbacks - A new Obermann collaboration

How can we work more closely with the University of Iowa? How can we bring voices beyond those of the actors and directors into the conversation? These were some of the questions that Sean Lewis, the new artistic director of Riverside Theatre, and Jennifer Holan, Riverside's Executive Director, asked the Obermann Center earlier this fall. Opening Up the Talkback Model Often, a talkback...

Free screening of STARVING THE BEAST, a new documentary exploring current issues in public higher education, Oct. 17

A new documentary that examines ongoing efforts to “disrupt and reform” America’s historic public universities will be shown at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 17, at at The Englert Theatre, 221 E. Washington Street, Iowa City. The film screening is free and open to the public. Starving the Beast tells the story of how public higher education has been defunded over the last three decades and makes a...

Have No Fear exhibit explores the role of Middle Eastern artists post 9/11

9/11 Unleashed Ethical Questions Like many current students, Rachel Winter (MA candidate, Religious Studies, CLAS) vividly remembers 9/11 as a pivotal moment of her early childhood. The day was already set to be a serious one, as her mother was scheduled to undergo a critical surgery at a hospital near downtown Chicago. As events unfolded on the east coast, it was unclear if other cities might...

Have No Fear - Exhibit explores the role of Middle Eastern artists post 9/11

9/11 Unleashed Ethical Questions Like many current students, Rachel Winter (MA candidate, Religious Studies) vividly remembers 9/11 as a pivotal moment of her early childhood. The day was already set to be a serious one as her mother was scheduled to undergo a critical surgery at a hospital near downtown Chicago. As events unfolded on the east coast, it was unclear if other cities might be...

Recent Events

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium  promotional image

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Thursday, April 4 to Saturday, April 6, 2019 (all day)
Disability is a universal human experience. Like gender, race, class, and sexuality, disability affects everyone in multiple ways, shaping and informing our notions of normality, family, community, fitness, and worth. Disability Studies, one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences and health sciences, examines abilities in the context of societies and cultures as they change over time. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed)...
Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium promotional image

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium

Saturday, March 30, 2019 (all day)
University Capitol Centre
Reading and Re-translation" is an international and interdisciplinary colloquium dedicated to the theorization and practice of reading. With funding from an International Programs Major Projects Award, organizers and speakers from around the globe will focus on the current state of research on reading and re-translation and will generate scholarly and creative exchanges between colleagues in diverse fields in the arts, sciences, literatures, and humanities. The conference opens with a special...
Finding Yourself in Academia: A Diné Historian’s Experience promotional image

Finding Yourself in Academia: A Diné Historian’s Experience

Friday, March 29, 2019 1:30pm to 3:00pm
University Capitol Centre
The Graduate History Society welcomes... Dr. Farina King Assistant Professor of History Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Dept Northeastern State University Tahlequah, Oklahoma Dr. Farina King is an assistant professor of history and affiliate of the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Department at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and received her Ph.D. from Arizona, her M.A. in African History from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. from Brigham Young University with a...
Out There:  A Symposium on Provocative Research, Pedagogy, and Academic Freedom promotional image

Out There: A Symposium on Provocative Research, Pedagogy, and Academic Freedom

Friday, March 29, 2019 9:00am to 4:00pm
Old Capitol Museum
Academics and intellectual freedom are increasingly under attack in the United States. This is demonstrated, for example, by the November 2016 launch of the Professor Watchlist by Turning Point USA and the targeted harassment of faculty aimed at intimidating educators and stifling the exchange of ideas and thoughtful debate. This symposium gathers administrators, faculty, and graduate students from across the University of Iowa to discuss the climate currently informing academic life, and to...
Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium promotional image

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium

Friday, March 29 to Saturday, March 30, 2019 (all day)
University Capitol Centre
Reading and Re-translation" is an international and interdisciplinary colloquium dedicated to the theorization and practice of reading. With funding from an International Programs Major Projects Award, organizers and speakers from around the globe will focus on the current state of research on reading and re-translation and will generate scholarly and creative exchanges between colleagues in diverse fields in the arts, sciences, literatures, and humanities. The conference opens with a special...
Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium promotional image

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium

Thursday, March 28 to Saturday, March 30, 2019 (all day)
University Capitol Centre
Reading and Re-translation" is an international and interdisciplinary colloquium dedicated to the theorization and practice of reading. With funding from an International Programs Major Projects Award, organizers and speakers from around the globe will focus on the current state of research on reading and re-translation and will generate scholarly and creative exchanges between colleagues in diverse fields in the arts, sciences, literatures, and humanities. The conference opens with a special...