Upcoming Events & Deadlines
Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants
Thursday, April 1, 2027 5:00pm
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)
Wednesday, April 7, 2027 5:00pm
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...
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News
From the Hank Lab to the Streets of Romania: A Conversation with Patricia Marga
In a nation confronting one of the highest rates of traffic accidents in Europe, the simple act of crossing the street is a critical public health challenge. This issue is the driving force behind the work of Patricia Marga, a PhD student in public health from Romania. She's on a mission to tackle this crisis by exploring how virtual reality can be harnessed to study and improve pedestrian safety for the most vulnerable: elderly citizens crossing busy city streets and children navigating crowded school zones. Her pursuit of research methods on injury prevention brought her to the University of Iowa this fall as an Obermann International Fellow.
A Language in Motion: Jordan Gigout and Dance Notation
How do you write down a dance? To capture the body’s expressions, scholars have long turned to Kinetography Laban, a system for recording and analyzing movement that uses abstract symbols to define the direction of movement and the parts of the body that perform it, among other parameters. But what happens when that language of symbols is itself a historical artifact, reflecting the biases of its time? Can a system built on a specific vision of the body ever truly capture the full diversity of human movement, or does it inevitably shape what it records? This is the critical and creative realm of Jordan Gigout, a dancer and dance-notation scholar from Essen, Germany. His research explores how this historical language for movement can continue to evolve and inspire new ways of thinking about choreography today. This fall, we welcomed him as an Obermann International Fellow.
Time, Care, & the Moral Self with Shazia Rehman Khan
Often, an hourly employee, bound by the routines and schedules of a workplace, finds that she is constantly thinking about being somewhere she is needed more, perhaps at home, taking care of a child or elderly relative. While many researchers have studied how this internal conflict affects the worker's professional output, few have studied how it affects her self-image or moral self-concept. This is the province of Shazia Rehman Khan, Professor of Business and Social Ethics at Pakistan's Bahria University. Her scholarship asks whether women are the primary victims of organizational time structures (as they must often balance workplace schedules with demands for care and domestic work) and, more generally, how "clock time" shapes our moral selves. Khan recently spent a month at the University of Iowa as an Obermann International Fellow furthering her research on time justice and care ethics.
Inside Scholarly Publishing: A Conversation with Sara Jo Cohen
Ahead of her November residency, we asked Obermann Editor-in-Residence Sara Jo Cohen about what she hopes to accomplish during her time here, her advice on crafting strong proposals, the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing, and the exciting ways digital platforms are expanding scholarship. She also shared her own career journey from graduate study in English to university press publishing, reflected on the skills early-career scholars most need to cultivate today, and offered practical guidance for undergraduates seeking a foothold in the publishing world.
Rethinking Aging with Mercedes Bern-Klug
How often do you spend time with people significantly older than you? Not very often, if you’re like most Americans. “We live in an age-segregated society,” notes Mercedes Bern-Klug, professor, mentor, researcher, and practitioner at the UI School of Social Work. “Young people hang out with young people. Teenagers hang out with teenagers. There are few opportunities for the generations to mix, outside of places of worship.”
A Wonderful Place to Write
The week after classes finished in the spring, I had the opportunity to participate in the Obermann Center’s End-of-Year Writing Retreat. The retreat offered faculty, staff, and students dedicated time to work on writing projects, which I hoped to spend editing my novel, a climate dystopia that centers on youth empowerment and the feeling of hopelessness that many of us experience as the climate changes despite our many efforts. Upon receiving an email of acceptance to the retreat, I was in class and could barely keep from grinning. However, underneath all that excitement, I felt a flicker of impostor syndrome. I didn’t know anyone in the retreat, and to make it more daunting, I was the only undergraduate student. So, even as I texted my friends and parents, overjoyed that I had been accepted, I was worried that I would be completely out of place.
