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...

View more events

Spacer

News

Sara Goldrick-Rab's Feb. 13 college affordability talks available online

On February 13, 2017, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Professor of Higher Education Policy & Sociology at Temple University, visited the UI campus to discuss the crisis of college affordability and student loan debt. Both of her public lectures are now available online. Listen to Sara Goldrick-Rab's Inequality Seminar talk, “Making College Affordable: Adventures in Scholar-Activism.” Watch her lecture,...

Artistic director Michael Rohd to discuss cultivating community-centered arts April 5

Effective collaboration starts with something very simple: listening. Michael Rohd, Artistic Director of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice and the Sojourn Theatre, will speak about his experiences collaborating with arts councils, service organizations, artists, community agencies, and local governments around the country to make space and context for meaningful, arts-based partnership...

A Symposium Bears Fruit: New book and an inter-institutional grant the latest results of The Latino Midwest

Convening the right group of people at the right time can create not just a ripple effect but a tidal wave of creative, collaborative products. Claire Fox (English and Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS) has seen this firsthand. Since she co-directed The Latino Midwest, the 2012–13 Obermann Humanities Symposium, a new University of Iowa program has come into being, a related textbook is soon to be...

The Phenomena of Attention: Shaun Vecera's Current Study of Distracted Driving

The stoplight has just turned red. Your cell phone is sitting on the seat next to you, and it vibrated a few blocks back. Should you pick it up and check it? Could this be considered distracted driving, even though the car isn’t moving? Without a doubt, says Shaun Vecera (Psychological & Brain Sciences, CLAS), a current Obermann Fellow-in-Residence who is studying individuals prone to risky...

Anne Fausto-Sterling to Present at Darwin Days

This Friday and Saturday (March 3 and 4), feminist biologist Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling will visit the University of Iowa to participate in Iowa City's celebration of Darwin Day. Fausto-Sterling will give two talks, a professional talk about her current research on gender and development on Friday at 3 pm in the Kollros Auditorium (Biology Building East) and a public lecture on gender, science...

Announcing "1984 in 2017: A Symposium"

This April, Loren Glass (English, CLAS; Center for the Book) and the UI Center for Human Rights will present an interdisciplinary public symposium, 1984 in 2017. The all-day event will explore correlations between George Orwell's dystopian—and newly bestselling—novel 1984 and current events, addressing such questions as, What does it mean to live in a world where dystopian fiction resembles...

Recent Events

2023 Virtual Dissertation Camp promotional image

2023 Virtual Dissertation Camp

Tuesday, May 30, 2023 9:00am to 1:00pm
Virtual

The Writing Center's annual Summer Dissertation Camp takes place via Zoom in the first two weeks of June. Students meet in discussion groups, write together, track their progress on blogs, and attend presentations on dissertation-related topics.

Applications are due by 5 p.m. Sunday, May 14. See writingcenter.uiowa.edu/graduate-student-programs for more details.

Please note that we have a limited number of spaces, so priority is given to students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed...

Wide Lens: Memory promotional image

Wide Lens: Memory

Friday, May 5, 2023 3:00pm to 4:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

What is forgotten? What is remembered? How reliable are our recollections? What ethical questions could or should guide how we engage with others’ memories? Join us at the Stanley Museum of Art as six scholar-artists reflect on memory from the perspective of various disciplines.

This is the second gathering in the UI's new Wide Lens series, in which researchers, scholars, and artists from across the university briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest, pecha kucha–style, at the...

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Fall 2023) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Faculty Fellows (Fall 2023)

Tuesday, May 2, 2023 5:00pm

Obermann Center Faculty Fellows (formerly Fellows-in-Residence) fully devote themselves to projects within an interdisciplinary community. The program supports artists, researchers, and scholars during periods when focus and feedback are crucial. The 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...

Finding Funding: Wise and Witty Ways to Search — An Obermann Get It Done workshop with Mary Blackwood promotional image

Finding Funding: Wise and Witty Ways to Search — An Obermann Get It Done workshop with Mary Blackwood

Thursday, April 27, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

Do you have a great idea for a project but need some funding to accomplish it? Learn about how committing an hour of your week can pay off! In this session, Mary Blackwood, Senior Sponsored Research Specialist at the UI Division of Sponsored Programs, will talk about how to set yourself up for grant-seeking success, how to manage roadblocks on the journey, and why anyone—from experienced faculty to newbie grad student—can increase their chances of getting a grant award by finding the right...

Craft, Critique, Culture Conference promotional image

Craft, Critique, Culture Conference

Thursday, April 20 to Saturday, April 22, 2023 (all day)
English-Philosophy Building

Our embeddedness within a more-than-human world is one part of what defines us as human. In the 1940s, Iowa-based environmentalist Aldo Leopold offered a land-based ethic: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” We hope to hear papers pursuing questions within and adjacent to the environment, broadly conceived. We are interested in how life is becoming less livable and for whom that is happening...

University of Iowa Lecture Committee: Jelani Cobb - "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today" promotional image

University of Iowa Lecture Committee: Jelani Cobb - "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today"

Wednesday, April 19, 2023 7:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Please join Jelani Cobb, author and Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, for his lecture "The Half-Life of Freedom, Race, and Justice in America Today."

All University lectures are free and open to the public. 

This lecture is sponsored by the following University of Iowa Departments and Programs: African American Studies, American Studies, Cinematic Arts, CLAS Dean's Office, Communication Studies, History, Magid center for Writing, English, Obermann Center, and the Provost's Office. 

Canceled