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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

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Reviving Biophilia—Mary Trachsel Considers Our Disconnect from the Natural World

Animals on Campus Humans share the state of Iowa with as many as 20 million hogs, in addition to millions of chickens and cows. In a state so densely populated with non-human animals, why are they so invisible to us on the University of Iowa campus? This wasn’t always the case. In the 1800s, a fence was erected around the Pentacrest to keep pigs off the grounds. An early professor of writing...
Noaquia Callahan portrait, German Fulbright award winner

A Q&A with 2016-17 Fulbright winner Noaquia Callahan

A Q&A with 2016-17 Fulbright winner Noaquia Callahan Authored by Benjamin Partridge About Noaquia: Noaquia Callahan, P.h.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa and 2016-17 Fulbright grant winner. Noaquia Callahan, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa, is one of 13 Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant winners from the UI for 2016-17. Callahan was chosen as...
Cultural Textural Exchange.jpg

Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar to Focus on Eurasian Manuscripts in 2016-17

Cultural and Textual Exchanges: The Manuscript Across Pre-Modern Eurasia Exploring manuscript diversity before the printed book During the 2016-17 academic year, a core group of University of Iowa faculty and graduate students will work to map cultural exchanges across Eurasia from roughly 400 CE ­ ca. 1450 CE, by focusing on the development, distribution and sharing of manuscript...

Digital Bridges to Obermann - Summer 2016 Institute and Collaborations

This summer the Obermann Center will host a number of faculty projects thanks to the generous support of our Andrew W. Mellon Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry partnership with Grinnell College. The goal of the grant is to experiment with ways that faculty and students from a liberal arts college and a research university can mutually enrich their scholarship and teaching through creative...

Why I Give to the Obermann Center - Ken Brown

The Obermann Center holds a special place in my heart. This is so not because of Director Teresa Mangum’s southern charm or the cookies in the kitchen, although both are gifts to all who visit. Instead, I love Obermann for what it offers to scholars on this campus, and for the opportunities it has given me to be in community with these very scholars. "Obermann offers the impetus and the...

HASTAC Scholars Reflect on Graduate Institute Symposium

On March 3-4, 2016, the Obermann Graduate Institute celebrated its tenth anniversary. In addition to welcoming back alumni of the program, including Tala Al-Rousan (Harvard), Ted Gutsche (Florida International University), Bridget Draxler (Monmouth College), and Craig Eley (ACLS Scholar, Wisconsin Public Radio), we were also joined by founding co-director David Redlawsk, currently at Rutgers and...

Recent Events

Summer Institute on Cross-Disciplinary Graduate Education promotional image

Summer Institute on Cross-Disciplinary Graduate Education

Tuesday, June 8 3:00pm to Friday, June 11, 2021 12:00pm
Virtual

How can cross-disciplinary, project-based courses serve graduate students across the University? This question is under investigation at the University of Iowa by both the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good PHD initiative and the National Science Foundation NRT-Funded Sustainable Water Development Graduate Program as well as implicitly in interdisciplinary degrees in many corners of the University.

In the past decade, groups of UI faculty members have taught “Big Ideas”...

Black Lives on Screen: "Black Spring" (in 5 parts) promotional image

Black Lives on Screen: "Black Spring" (in 5 parts)

Thursday, May 6, 2021 7:00pm to 10:00pm
Virtual

Showcasing the work of a diverse range of acclaimed African American and Black filmmakers, artists, and scholars, the Black Lives on Screen online screening series and discussions will promote and celebrate the rich history, present, and future of Black cinematic expression in the context of an inclusive, educational, and inspiring experience for the entire UI community.

Event Information: 
Black Spring (in 5 parts) “poetic conversation in film” pre-recorded performance by Professor Tracie...

Grant Writing with Mary Blackwood — An Obermann Get It Done! Workshop promotional image

Grant Writing with Mary Blackwood — An Obermann Get It Done! Workshop

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

You have a great project in mind, but you need funding to implement it. Maybe you’ve even identified an opportunity for grant funding, but how do you write a grant that will get funded? What do the grant reviewers look for in a proposal? How do you give yourself an edge in the application process? Mary Blackwood, Senior Sponsored Research Specialist at the UI Division of Sponsored Programs, will share her advice and take questions on the topic of grant writing.

All are welcome at this free...

Moderated Conversation with Cathy Park Hong promotional image

Moderated Conversation with Cathy Park Hong

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Virtual

Poet, writer, professor, and Iowa Writer’s Workshop alumna Cathy Park Hong will engage in a moderated conversation with members of the University of Iowa focused on her book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020).

This event will follow a series of reading roundtables and will be the keynote address for this year’s UI Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration. A Q&A will follow for the audience to engage with Cathy Park Hong.

Graphic Histories: A Discussion with Rachel Williams and Karlos Hill promotional image

Graphic Histories: A Discussion with Rachel Williams and Karlos Hill

Thursday, April 15, 2021 11:30am to 12:30pm
Virtual

Two scholar-artists will share their experience with translating historical research to a graphic form. Rachel Williams recently published two books, Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (University of North Carolina Press), which uses incorporating firsthand accounts collected by the NAACP, and Elegy for Mary Turner (Penguin Randomhouse), a haunting depiction of American racial violence and lynching. Hill, who directs the African and African American Studies...

Approaches to Inclusive Graduate Admissions: Workshop with Dean Todd Butler promotional image

Approaches to Inclusive Graduate Admissions: Workshop with Dean Todd Butler

Friday, April 2, 2021 1:00pm to 3:00pm
Virtual

In collaboration with CLAS and the Graduate College, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good initiative will host Interim Dean Todd Butler (Washington State University College of Arts & Sciences) for a reprisal of a workshop he recently held for the Modern Language Association on inclusive admissions. During the virtual workshop, Dean Butler will describe how Washington State University redesigned admissions in response to students’...