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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

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 Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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...

News

Apply for Summer '17 Alternative Careers for Humanities PhD Candidates Workshop in Chicago

Angela Toscano (English) and Anu Thapa (Cinematic Arts) were selected as Humanities Without Walls Fellows for last summer's workshop. The program is part of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation award to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to fund an extensive consortium of fifteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond...
IDRG group stands outside of Obermann Center

The Meek and the Mighty: Interdisciplinary Research Grant Explores Diversity Programs

The “Big Ten Conference” is often used as shorthand for football. But faced with demands for a more just society, this group of Midwestern research universities has also taken the lead in making higher education accessible. In 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Indiana University led the Big Ten in establishing a program for first-generation college students. A decade later, in 1979, during the Women’s Movement, Ohio State University was the first in the Big Ten to create a living-learning community to support and recruit women in STEM fields. Since then, Big Ten schools, like most universities in the United States, have implemented programs that provide community, mentorship, and other forms of support to minority and culturally diverse students. What factors influence the time to adoption of these programs? What impact do the programs have shortly after they’re adopted? Does, for instance, the percentage of women majoring in STEM fields increase on campuses that implement those support programs? Do students who participate in such programs tend to stay enrolled at the school and finish their degrees, compared to students who don’t? These are the questions Aislinn Conrad-Hiebner (School of Social Work, CLAS),  Martin Kivlighan (College of Education), and Elizabeth Menninga (Political Science, CLAS) are exploring as part of their fledgling project “The Meek and the Mighty: Exploring Diversity Programs among Big Ten Universities,” which they initiated last summer as part of an Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant.

Meet the Manuscript with Obermann Graduate Fellow Heather Wacha

28 beaver fur hats. 6 panels of tapestries. Wool from Flanders. Silks, cloths, and linens. Furniture, paintings, and sculptures. Gold and Silver. All manner of carriages. If you had been an heir of the estate of Don Francisco Muñoz Carillo, a nobleman from Cuenca, Spain, who died in 1687, you may have received some part of these items. However, before you get too excited, you would have also...

2015-16 Obermann Annual Report

Welcome to the 2015-16 Obermann Center Annual Report! View the report in its entirety. I often find the best inspiration for the year ahead is a quick look in the rearview mirror. That’s certainly true for the Obermann Center, where that mirror frames a panorama of fellow travelers—faculty, staff, students, and partners—in 2015–16. In Summer 2015, faculty with Obermann Interdisciplinary...

Humanities research and the human condition

This article by Obermann Center Director Teresa Mangum appeared in the July 14, 2016, edition of Iowa Now: If you follow news about higher education, you know that the value of humanities scholarship—the study of the arts, cultures, history, languages, literature, philosophy, and religion—is often called into question. Pummeled by busyness, technical challenges, health care costs...

Open-Access Tools Make Research Available to All

Not so long ago, if you wanted to read The Odyssey, you needed several massive—and expensive—tomes: the original text, appendices of endnotes, maps, and family trees, maybe even a Greek dictionary. Today, thanks to digital humanists like Sarah Bond (Classics, CLAS) and Paul Dilley (Classics and Religious Studies, CLAS), you can access many classical texts online, for free, with notes...

Recent Events

Film Screening of Marshawn Lynch: A History - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

Film Screening of Marshawn Lynch: A History - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21, 2023 7:30pm to 9:30pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

The film screening will be followed with a discussion. 

Marshawn Lynch: A History is a kaleidoscopic look at newly retired NFL star Marshawn Lynch and his use of silence as a form of protest. Culling more than 700 video clips and placing them in dramatic, rapid, and radical juxtaposition, the film is a powerful political parable about the American media-sports complex and its deep complicity with racial oppression. Learn more about the film here.

This event is a part of the Sports, Power, and...

Dr. André Brock, A Mode of Black Life: Afro-Optimism and the Black Digital, Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Lecture

Thursday, September 21, 2023 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

What are the possibilities of Black life beyond liberation, resistance, and oppression? This talk draws upon antiblackness, Black indigeneity, libidinal economy, and science and technology studies to offer a compelling alternative: Afro-Optimism, or the manner in which Black folk build resources to thrive, not just survive, using examples from evocations of Black culture and the Black mundane on Twitter.

André L. Brock is  an associate professor at the School of Literature, Media, and...

'Just 'Bout That Action, Boss: The Televisual Politics and Pleasures of Marshawn Lynch' Keynote Address -  Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

'Just 'Bout That Action, Boss: The Televisual Politics and Pleasures of Marshawn Lynch' Keynote Address - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21, 2023 6:30pm to 7:30pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

How can the history of activism in sports help us understand the dynamics shaping conflicts today? How might labor relations in sport be imagined differently? How does the structure of sporting entertainment provide opportunities and obstacles to activism, and how can activists navigate these challenges?

As fans flock to sports arenas to cheer for their favorite teams, these spaces are simultaneously important societal battlegrounds. From acts of political protest by players to legislative...

Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide promotional image

Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide

Thursday, September 21, 2023 5:30pm
Schaeffer Hall

Join us for a talk by Dr. Elyse Semerdjian, a social historian of the Ottoman Empire whose research focuses on the experiences of women and the empire's Armenian subjects. She has authored “Off the Straight Path”: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo (Syracuse University Press, 2008) and Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford University Press, 2023) as well as several articles on gender, Ottoman Armenians, urban history, and law in the Ottoman Empire. She has...

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop (2023–24) promotional image

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop (2023–24)

Thursday, September 21, 2023 5:00pm

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books 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.

Applications for upcoming Book Ends workshops are due June 7, 2023 and Sept. 21, 2023.

UI Special Collections Open House - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

UI Special Collections Open House - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Thursday, September 21, 2023 3:00pm to 4:30pm
University of Iowa Main Library

This open house will display sports-related materials from the University of Iowa Libraries' Special Collections and the Iowa Women's Archive.

This event is a part of the Sports, Power, and Resistance: Legacies and Futures Obermann Arts and Humanities Symposium. 

Free and open to all.