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

2017 Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows Announced

The 2017 Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy will meet from January 9-13, 2017. The group of 16 students were selected from a competitive pool representing five colleges and in disciplines ranging from Library and Information Science to Community and Behavioral Health. Now in its eleventh year, the Graduate Institute offers a competitively selected group of UI graduate...

Engaged Filmmaking - Documentary Course Reflects Graduate Institute's Teachings

Nonfiction filmmaking is inherently collaborative. Anna Swanson [pictured in black shirt working with a student] asked the students in her "Publicly Engaged Documentary" course both to question and commit to the partnerships that such filmmaking necessitates. Go beyond getting a project done or thinking toward job skills, she recommended; instead, consider being an artist-advocate or a scholar...

A Letter to the Obermann Community

A Letter to Our Colleagues, Collaborators, and Friends The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies was founded on the belief that what makes colleges and universities invaluable and irreplaceable is that they bring people together for the express purpose of expanding horizons, using research and debate to test assumptions and claims, solving problems, and forming the habit of lifelong learning. At...
Man stretching animal hide for book

Sawyer Mellon Seminar Maps Cultural Exchanges Across Eurasia

International Scholars and Book Conservators Explore Premodern Texts Thousands of years before the advent of print, texts were recorded in manuscript form--written out by hand on papyrus, parchment, paper, silk, bamboo, or other materials. Scholars involved in the 2016-17 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at the University of Iowa are renewing their examination of these early texts, asking such questions...
The Taming poster

Riverside Theatre Talkbacks - A new Obermann collaboration

How can we work more closely with the University of Iowa? How can we bring voices beyond those of the actors and directors into the conversation? These were some of the questions that Sean Lewis, the new artistic director of Riverside Theatre, and Jennifer Holan, Riverside's Executive Director, asked the Obermann Center earlier this fall. Opening Up the Talkback Model Often, a talkback...

Free screening of STARVING THE BEAST, a new documentary exploring current issues in public higher education, Oct. 17

A new documentary that examines ongoing efforts to “disrupt and reform” America’s historic public universities will be shown at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 17, at at The Englert Theatre, 221 E. Washington Street, Iowa City. The film screening is free and open to the public. Starving the Beast tells the story of how public higher education has been defunded over the last three decades and makes a...

Recent Events

Translating Research into Graphic Forms — A Discussion

Friday, October 28, 2022 3:30pm
Virtual

The Creative and Critical Practice and Pedagogy Obermann Working Group is exploring the potential of creative dissertations Friday, Oct. 28 at 3:30 p.m. on Zoom. They’re reading three online articles by Nick Sousanis, Professor at San Francisco State University and the first of a growing number of scholars translating research into graphic forms. 

Free and open to all. For the Zoom link and links to the readings, please contact the group's co-directors, Professor Harry Stecopoulos (harilaos...

The Handmaiden promotional image

The Handmaiden

Thursday, October 27, 2022 6:30pm to 9:00pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

Please join us for a screening of Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden.

After the screening, KoRN and GWSS director Hyaeweol Choi will join Corey Creekmur (English, Cinematic Arts) to discuss the impact of Park Chan-wook on cinema. 

Open to all.

Black Audience Labor for Naught: The Long-Term Problem with Embracing Plasticity as Meaningful Representation — Talk by Kristen Warner (University of Alabama) promotional image

Black Audience Labor for Naught: The Long-Term Problem with Embracing Plasticity as Meaningful Representation — Talk by Kristen Warner (University of Alabama)

Thursday, October 27, 2022 3:30pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

On Jan. 9, 2020, an Instagram post and a new website from Royal Sussex announced that The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, aka Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, were stepping away from full-time royal duty to live a more private life. Dubbed by the British tabloid’s The Sun as “Megxit,” their seemingly self-imposed exile became non-stop fodder for days as revelations about the long-term planning of the scheme from the couple littered the pages of every online outlet. Watching the tsunami of supportive...

A Chinese Geo-Narrative Painting at the Stanley Museum of Art, with Elizabeth Kindall, Visiting Scholar, School of Art and Art History promotional image

A Chinese Geo-Narrative Painting at the Stanley Museum of Art, with Elizabeth Kindall, Visiting Scholar, School of Art and Art History

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 5:30pm
Art Building West

“A Chinese Geo-Narrative Painting at the Stanley Museum of Art”
Visiting scholar: Elizabeth Kindall, Associate Professor, University of St. Thomas
Oct. 26 (Wed) 5:30 p.m. CT, ABW116 or Zoom (register here) https://uiowa.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMrd-GoqT0oG9HbMoMnfCKSui75xDimEbSN
Hosted by the School of Art and Art History, co-sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

This lecture is free and open to the public.

Elizabeth Kindall is...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2023) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2023)

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 5:00pm

The 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 or four 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...

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...