Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar promotional image

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

The Research Development Office is hosting an in-person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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.

View more events

Spacer

News

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...
human immunodeficiency virus

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...

Recent Events

Latina/o/x Citizenship and National Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Citizenship and National Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, November 8, 2019 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

For this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- three speakers will address the ways Latina/o/x communities are integrated into and respond to dominant U.S. political and cultural social practices. Speakers will provide a strong historical foundation, attend to political processes, and draw out some of the less formal ways in which citizenship is imagined and practiced in Latina/o/x...

Stacey Abrams: Assuring Free and Fair Elections in 2020 promotional image

Stacey Abrams: Assuring Free and Fair Elections in 2020

Monday, November 4, 2019 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Stacey Abrams lost a tightly contested battle for Georgia Governor amid controversy over voters' access to the polls. She has since founded Fair Fight 2020 with the aim of assuring free and fair elections. Join us for Stacey's presentation, along with a campus and community dialogue about the state of voter rights going into the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

This event is part of the UI 100th commemoration of the 19th amendment series, which reflects on and celebrates the 100th anniversary...

Black Curators' Roundtable promotional image

Black Curators' Roundtable

Monday, October 28, 2019 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This event marks the end of the exhibition Anonymous Donor, guest-curated by Anaïs Duplan and shown at the Figge Art Museum as a part of the Stanley Museum of Art collections-sharing program, Legacies for Iowa, sponsored by the Matthew Bucksbaum Family. Join Duplan and curators Gia Hamilton, Eileen Isagon Skyers, and Gee Wesley in a moderated conversation about their practice working in multiple exhibit, artistic, and community contexts.

Black Curators' Roundtable is organized by the Center for...

Latina/o/x Migration (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Migration (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, October 25, 2019 (all day)
MERGE

In this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- three invited speakers will explore questions related to migration and national belonging. Each speaker will deliver a plenary address, which will be followed by Q&A.

Speakers include the following: Karma Chávez is Associate Professor and Chair of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a rhetorical...

The Burden of Gun Violence: Trends and Policy Solutions promotional image

The Burden of Gun Violence: Trends and Policy Solutions

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 7:00pm to 9:00pm

This event brings together a panel of experts to discuss the burden of American gun violence and the potential for evidenced-based public policy solutions.

The PPC’s Crime & Justice Policy research program, directed by Mark Berg, is hosting this panel as part of the Run Up to the 2020 Caucus – a series designed to examine different policy topics that will be discussed during the campaign.

Topics will include:

Lethal and non-lethal gun violence trends in the United States Gender and gun...
Conversation: A Vital Tool for Mending Our Democracy promotional image

Conversation: A Vital Tool for Mending Our Democracy

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Many of us long for complex conversations with a greater range of people, and yet we aren't entirely sure how to access such conversations. In this Obermann Conversation, we convene three people -- Lore Baur, Ben Hassman, and Sherry Watt -- who actively organize and facilitate conversations that might be perceived as difficult. Each of them will share some of the skills involved in holding a mutually respectful and beneficial conversation, as well as some of the power that this relatively simple...