Upcoming Events
Locating Reproductive Justice: Global & Regional Perspectives — 2024–25 Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium
Thursday, March 27 to Friday, March 28, 2025 (all day)
As calls for transnational solidarity among reproductive justice movements emerge, communities are asking how reproductive liberation is tethered to various social movements. Directed by Lina-Maria Murillo (Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies and History) and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (Communication Studies and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies), this symposium brings together scholars and artists with local, regional, and global perspectives to bear on the pursuit of reproductive justice as we...
Writing for The Conversation: Informational Lunch for Grad Students and Postdocs
Friday, April 11, 2025 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Join the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, and the Graduate College for lunch and an introduction to pitching your research to The Conversation US with Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Associate Vice President for Research.
The Conversation is an independent news organization dedicated to unlocking the knowledge of academic experts for the public good. With a monthly readership of 20 million, The Conversation expertly shares a scholar’s expertise far...
Graduate Student Session with Mark Simpson-Vos, Obermann Editor-in-Residence
Thursday, April 17, 2025 10:00am to 11:00am
This interactive talk for PhD and MFA students in the writing disciplines will outline the publishing process for first books. The session will guide graduate students through the steps of the academic publishing process, with a focus on demystifying the journey from dissertation/thesis to manuscript to published book. Key topics will include identifying the right academic publisher, understanding peer review, negotiating contracts, and building a strong proposal. Led by Mark Simpson-Vos, Senior...
"Beyond Crisis: Restoring the Creative Partnership between Authors and Publishers" - Lecture by Mark Simpson-Vos
Thursday, April 17, 2025 3:30pm to 4:30pm
At this public lecture, Mark Simpson-Vos — Senior Executive Editor at University of North Carolina Press — will discuss the way commentators have since the 1970s routinely trotted out the idea that scholarly publishing is in crisis, and how the stance of publishers in particular has been to shrug off such ideas. In this moment, however, it is impossible to ignore the deep strains within the scholarly publishing ecosystem, amidst increasingly turbulent times for American higher education. Lament...
Spacer
Upcoming Application Deadlines
Upcoming Application Deadlines
News
Smoke-Screen: Dance Performance Explore Themes of the Anthropocene
Smoke-Screen Debuts as Finale of Anthropocene Symposium Jennifer Kayle (Dance, CLAS; pictured left) has spent the past few months immersed in books like Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, as well as works about how complex science can be effectively communicated to a broader public. This research has been...
On the Trail of Parkinson’s — Jon Doorn Seeks Clues to Stop Neurodegenerative Disease
The second most common neurodegenerative disease is Parkinson’s Disease (PD). It affects more than 1 million Americans and 10 million people worldwide. The cause of this prevalent disease remains largely unknown. Genetics play a role but cannot account for all cases. While age is one contributor, it isn’t clear whether Parkinson’s comes with age or...
UI Faculty and Grad Students Selected for Humanities Without Walls Opportunities
The Obermann Center is delighted to be a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Without Walls consortium, led by the University of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Already, our graduate students and faculty are benefiting from this innovative partnership. Note: A second round of applications will be invited soon for summer 2015 seed grants. In fall 2015, we...
Follow the children: Michael Hill views the adolescent character as a weathervane
In a 1949 poem, Gwendolyn Brooks asked, “What shall I give my children? . . . / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land . . . ” The question is central to Michael Hill’s new book, A Little Child Shall Lead Them: Adolescence in African American Novels, 1941-2008.Hill, a University of Iowa professor of English and African American Studies and Fall 2014 Obermann Fellow in Residence, is curious...
Designing the Digital Future - A Symposium Summary
Designing the Digital Future – A Symposium Summary To many, informatics means big data. But as the 2014 Obermann Working Symposium, “Designing the Digital Future: A Human-Centered Approach to Informatics,” November 7-8, 2014, demonstrated, informatics technology intersects with narrative, the arts, collaborative learning, dance, diversity, narrative, social justice movements, values sensitive...
2015 Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows Selected
The following students have been selected for the 2015 Obermann Graduate Institute. As Obermann Graduate Fellows, they will participate in a one-week intensive institute exploring how to combine public engagement with their research and teaching. The Institute, now in its ninth year, is co-directed by Barbara Eckstein (English, CLAS) and Craig Just (Civil and Environmental Engineering), with...
