Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar promotional image

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

The Research Development Office is hosting an in-person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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

Jessica Pleyel ironing

Jessica Pleyel: Mending through Art

Wax guns, duck decoys, and nail polish. These are some of the items in artist Jessica Pleyel’s community engagement toolkit. The Obermann Graduate Institute alumna is currently bringing audiences together to consider gun violence against women, especially by domestic partners. Her exhibition, To(get)her: Meeting/Melting/Mending, had a month-long run at the Des Moines Social Club this spring, and...

All in the Mix: Erica Damman's Environmental Games

Remove the letter A from Scrabble and things get tricky pretty quickly. Likewise, remove apis melliferia, or the honeybee, from the world’s ecosystems and things start to fall apart. Almonds and apples, coffee and avocados—all become, if not extinct, then exceptionally rarer without bees to pollinate them. Industries that employ thousands of people are compromised. The food that sustains certain...

Summer Brings Russell Scholars, a pair of education projects, two arts projects, and digital collaborations to the Obermann Center

The Obermann Center will host multiple groups this summer, working on projects ranging from an edited anthology to a "film opera." The Philosophy of Physical Atomism is the focus of this year's Obermann Summer Seminar. These lectures, given by Bertrand Russell in the early months of 1918, were published in pairs in four issues...

Talking “Prophylactic Chats” with Fellow-in-Residence Edward Cohn

It's 1975, Lithuania. You receive a letter in the mail—brief, and on KGB letterhead. "You are invited to a friendly chat at our headquarters," it says. "Next Monday, 10 a.m." Gulp. These "chats"—frequent occurrences in Khrushchev-era Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia—are the current fascination of Obermann Fellow-in-Residence Edward Cohn. A professor of history at Grinnell College, Dr. Cohn...

Humanities on the Hill 2017—with the National Humanities Alliance

Just as news was breaking that the proposed federal budget could zero out the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, I joined representatives from nearly 200 colleges and universities in Washington, D.C. for the 2017 National Humanities Alliance Advocacy Day. As the current secretary of the NHA Board of Directors, I know firsthand what...

The Making of "Hot Tamale Louie": Fantastical immigrant’s tale inspires multi-genre production

Sometime between chemo and radiation, John Rapson was struck by inspiration. It came in the form of a New Yorker article. The long piece, “Citizen Khan” by Kathryn Schulz, is as meandering and rich as its subject: Zarif Khan. After reading the article last June, Rapson, a jazz professor in the School of Music, immediately knew that he’d found the subject for a new piece. Not only would it include...

Recent Events

Wide Lens: LISTENING promotional image

Wide Lens: LISTENING

Thursday, May 8, 2025 5:30pm
Voxman Music Building

In a world full of noise, we often try to listen—to conversations with colleagues and family, to music in our headphones, to videos blasting from our smartphones. We hear all these things daily, but what does it mean to truly listen? In what sense do devices also listen to us? What is the role of silence in listening? How has listening changed over time? Can political tensions be solved through listening? How is listening both an art and a science?

This Wide Lens event brings together researchers...

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival promotional image

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival

Sunday, April 27, 2025 (all day)
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
The 20th Annual Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival
Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival promotional image

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival

Saturday, April 26 to Sunday, April 27, 2025 (all day)
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
The 20th Annual Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival
Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival promotional image

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival

Friday, April 25 to Sunday, April 27, 2025 (all day)
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
The 20th Annual Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival
Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Mark Simpson-Vos promotional image

Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Mark Simpson-Vos

Friday, April 18, 2025 9:00am to 12:00pm
111 Church Street

For this workshop, 4–5 UI faculty members will submit book proposal drafts for a collaborative feedback session led by Mark Simpson-Vos, Senior Executive Editor at University of North Carolina Press.

The session is designed to help authors write a compelling book proposal, with a focus on crafting a strong pitch, identifying target audiences, and outlining the project’s structure. The workshop’s goal is for participants to walk away with a strong and cohesive book proposal, increasing their...

"Beyond Crisis: Restoring the Creative Partnership between Authors and Publishers" - Lecture by Mark Simpson-Vos promotional image

"Beyond Crisis: Restoring the Creative Partnership between Authors and Publishers" - Lecture by Mark Simpson-Vos

Thursday, April 17, 2025 3:30pm to 4:30pm
111 Church Street

At this public lecture, Mark Simpson-Vos — Senior Executive Editor at University of North Carolina Press — will discuss the way commentators have since the 1970s routinely trotted out the idea that scholarly publishing is in crisis, and how the stance of publishers in particular has been to shrug off such ideas. In this moment, however, it is impossible to ignore the deep strains within the scholarly publishing ecosystem, amidst increasingly turbulent times for American higher education. Lament...