Upcoming Events

Don't Panic! Rethinking How We Frame Difficult Content in the Classroom promotional image

Don't Panic! Rethinking How We Frame Difficult Content in the Classroom

Thursday, February 20, 2025 4:00pm
Phillips Hall
Join us for a conversation about trigger warnings, content alerts, and other approaches to teaching potentially upsetting topics — led by Newell Ann Van Auken, Associate Professor of Instruction, Division of World Languages, Literatures, & Cultures. Co-hosted by the Center for Language and Culture Learning, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies (CAPS), and the Chinese Humanities and Arts Workshop (CHAW), an Obermann Working Group.
Artist Talk with Jerron Herman promotional image

Artist Talk with Jerron Herman

Thursday, February 20, 2025 5:00pm to 6:30pm
Public Space One
Join us for an inspiring conversation with acclaimed choreographer and disabled artist Jerron Herman, an artist compelled to create images of freedom.
Book Matters: Brady G’sell and Meena Khandelwal in conversation with Elana Buch promotional image

Book Matters: Brady G’sell and Meena Khandelwal in conversation with Elana Buch

Tuesday, February 25, 2025 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Prairie Lights Books
Join us for a reading and discussion, co-sponsored by Prairie Lights, to celebrate recent works from Brady G’sell and Meena Khandelwal, faculty in the University of Iowa Department of Anthropology and the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies Program. After the reading, Elana Buch, associate professor of anthropology, will join G’sell and Khandelwal for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Light refreshments will follow.
Radical Hope: Cultural Workers and Community Leaders in Conversation promotional image

Radical Hope: Cultural Workers and Community Leaders in Conversation

Monday, March 3, 2025 6:25pm to 7:00pm
Iowa City Public Library
Join Dr. Leigh Patel, Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor, for a panel discussion and conversation with Iowa cultural workers and community leaders. Dr. Patel is a Professor of Educational Foundation, Organizations and Policy at University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Patel's work focuses on the ways that formal education has consistently acted as one site of coloniality and oppression, and that education and studying is one of the strongest tools for liberation. Political education and...
View more events

Spacer

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat

Friday, March 14, 2025 5:00pm
Have you been waiting all school year to make serious progress on your book manuscript, article, or grant application? Jump-start your summer writing project at the Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat May 12–16, 2025! Fifteen participants will enjoy a week of quiet productivity apart from the distractions of campus at the beautiful North Ridge Pavilion in Coralville. Daily catered lunches will provide an opportunity for exchange and discussion with other writers across campus. Each day will...
Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2025–26) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Working Groups (2025–26)

Wednesday, April 9, 2025 5:00pm
Obermann Center Working Groups provide space, structure, and discretionary funding ($500 per year for 3 years) 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 explore new work and to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals. This program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a...
Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 5:00pm
Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Book 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. Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three...

News

Health Humanities: Building the Future of Research and Teaching

Health Humanities: Building the Future of Research and Teaching, a two-day Obermann Working Symposium, promises to be a paradigm-shifting moment for the University of Iowa and a leap forward in the larger field of the health humanities. The six keynote speakers include the editors of the two forthcoming health humanities anthologies, Paul Crawford and Tess Jones, as well as the editor of a graphic...
AI poster_2.jpeg

Inquiring About Affect - A Conversation with Naomi Greyser

How might the work of artists, scholars, and activists be more pleasurable and easeful? How might our working environments and labor conditions be more healthy? These are some of the questions this year’s Obermann Humanities Symposium, Affect & Inquiry, will address. Co-directed by Naomi Greyser (Rhetoric, CLAS), Deborah Whaley (American Studies, CLAS), and Jeffrey Bennett (Communication Studies...

2nd Iowa Humanities Festival: From Jamaica to Rome in a Day

Alta Vista, Bettendorf, Camanche, Elkader, Humboldt, Jamaica, McGregor, Persia, Rome, Zwingle—far-flung corners of the world have found their way into the very names of Iowa cities and towns. The 2014 Iowa Humanities Festival, “A World at Home | A Home in the World,” invites you to travel the world while staying right at home in the “French” city of Des Moines...
Sarah Guyer

Designing the Future for Publicly Engaged Research and Teaching in the Humanities

A recent New York Times Opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof—“Professors, We Need You!”—inspired national debate about the status of “public intellectuals.” The Obermann Center continues the conversation on March 10, 2014, with the next two speakers in our yearlong...

Andrea Charise On the Health Humanities Frontier

Using music to manage chronic pain. Training the eye to see emotional as well as physical symptoms of suffering in a gallery of portraits. Absorbing a sense of well-being through encounters with the written word. Bringing together the arts, humanities, and health sciences offers incalculable benefits. This April, the Obermann Center will offer a...

Comics in the Library, Museum and Classroom - Rachel Williams and Corey Creekmur Make a Case for Comics in Academia

Comics: Their Time Has Come — Three years ago, Corey Creekmur (Cinema & Comparative Literature and English, CLAS) and Rachel Williams (Art & Art History and GWSS, CLAS) and their colleague Ana Merino (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS) co-directed a highly successful Obermann Humanities Symposium, "Comics, Creativity, and Culture." The three-day event fostered dynamic exchanges between notable creators and...

Recent Events

Historically Speaking: History PhDs Tell Stories of Working Outside the Academy

Monday, February 24, 2020 3:30pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library
Join us on Monday, February 24 from 3:30pm to 5:30PM at the Iowa City Public Library meeting rooms for a panel and small group discussion by history PhD alumni, who will discuss their pathways to career diversity:  Karen Christianson Director, Department of Public Engagement, Newberry Library Sylvea Hollis Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow, National Park Service Eric Zimmer Historian, Vantage Point Historical Services This event is part of Humanities for the Public Good, an Andrew W...
ICE Enforcement: Impacts on Community Health and Well-Being — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

ICE Enforcement: Impacts on Community Health and Well-Being — An Obermann Conversation

Tuesday, February 4, 2020 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library
With attention drawn to events at the border, it can be easy to overlook the population of immigrants who live in fear of being deported or having family members deported. The effects of raids and other maneuvers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have deep impact on the overall health and well-being of Latino/a/x communities here in Iowa and across the country. The possibility of raids and deportation cause anxiety and depression, which affect the workplace and schools, as well as the...
Informational Meeting for Summer Humanities for the Public Good Internships promotional image

Informational Meeting for Summer Humanities for the Public Good Internships

Friday, January 31, 2020 12:00pm to 1:00pm
111 Church Street
Learn about the Summer 2020 Humanities for the Public Good Internship program. In addition to learning about the opportunities, expectations of participants, application process, you will also have the chance to talk with one of last year's interns and hear about their experience. 
Imagining the Latina/o/x Midwest (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Imagining the Latina/o/x Midwest (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, January 31, 2020 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library
In this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- three speakers will examine the potentials and pitfalls of imagining Latinidades in the Midwestern U.S. Building off the past success of the Latina/o Midwest Symposium, this kickoff event for the spring semester will draw attention to the ways in which Latina/o/x space and identity might be imagined and practiced outside of traditionally...
Manuscript Forum (Imagining Latinidades Mellon Sawyer Seminar) promotional image

Manuscript Forum (Imagining Latinidades Mellon Sawyer Seminar)

Thursday, January 30, 2020 11:30am to 12:30pm
111 Church Street
Manuscript Forum led by Dr. Sujey Vega, one of the Series Editors of the Latinos in Chicago and the Midwest Series (University of Illinois Press). Dr. Vega will share tips about the publishing process particularly for books.  This is a pre-event that is part of our Imagining the Latina/o/x Midwest Symposium taking place on Friday, January 31st at the Iowa City Public Library from 9:00am-4:30pm (https://events.uiowa.edu/28068). See our website for additional information: https:/...
United States of Anxiety: Building a Multiracial Democracy in 2020 promotional image

United States of Anxiety: Building a Multiracial Democracy in 2020

Monday, January 27, 2020 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Levitt Center for University Advancement
From WNYC Studios in New York City, The United States of Anxiety is a podcast about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future. Underlying almost every disagreement, every fervent debate as we approach the 2020 election is one basic question: Who is America for? This is an old question. Many of the political and social arguments we’re having now started in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Americans set out to do something no other country had tried before -- to build...