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

2018-19 Program Dates and Application Deadlines

FALL APPLICATION DEADLINES Obermann Center Fellows-in-Residence, Spring 2018 Application deadline: Sept. 12, 2017 The Obermann Fellows-in-Residence program is rooted in our mission: to support the work of individual scholars, while also providing Fellows with the opportunity to enrich an individual, discipline-specific project through interdisciplinary exchanges with a lively intellectual...
Jessica Pleyel ironing

Jessica Pleyel: Mending through Art

Jennifer New
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

Jennifer New
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

Jenna Hammerich
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...
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Recent Events

Application Deadline: Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium Director (2023–24) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium Director (2023–24)

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 5:00pm

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 Arts & Humanities Symposium!

These imaginative half- and whole-day symposia connect the arts and humanities with design, politics, health sciences, environmental studies, technology, and other disciplines via a compelling topic...

Microheterotopias: Chemistry Meets Glassblowing promotional image

Microheterotopias: Chemistry Meets Glassblowing

Friday, October 21, 2022 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Chemistry Building

“Desperate to solve chemistry’s greatest problem, Justus Liebig made the first Kaliapparat in 1830. That small piece of glassware started something big. The Kaliapparat made Liebig’s name. But lampworked glassware transformed chemistry. Ever since, chemists have used other worlds in glass—the Microheterotopias of my title—to manage matter. Making Microheterotopias relies on skilled scientific glassblowers. This talk explains what happened when chemistry met glassblowing—and why that connection...

"Medea." An Introduction. Opera Studies Forum

Thursday, October 20, 2022 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Phillips Hall

Prof. emeritus Robert Ketterer (Classics, University of Iowa) will introduce the opera "Medea" by Luigi Cherubini (first perf. 1797) and its production in this season by the Metropolitan Opera with streaming in theaters on Oct. 22. 

Revising Injustice: Emphatically Anti-racist Comics promotional image

Revising Injustice: Emphatically Anti-racist Comics

Wednesday, October 12, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

This event has been canceled.

Canceled
Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis

Thursday, September 29, 2022 4:00pm to 5:00pm
111 Church Street

The Obermann Center's 2022 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition will take place on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, from 4 to 5 p.m. at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (111 Church St.). It will be an in-person event, free and open to all. Please support our humanities graduate students and attend!

This 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely...

Works on Memory: Concepts and Projects - Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France promotional image

Works on Memory: Concepts and Projects - Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France

Thursday, September 29, 2022 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Virtual