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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

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 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. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

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 Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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...

News

Arts, Education, and Social Justice: Meet Informatics

The word “informatics” summons the 1999 film “The Matrix” — a terrifying world of streaming numbers (and Keanu Reeves). In the real world, patterns in a sea of data can become life rafts, for example, to individuals suffering from disease or activists tracking pollution. Designing ways for humans to interact effectively with computers and information is the goal of researchers in the growing area of computer science sometimes called human-computer interaction or HCI.
Performance from the Dance.Draw series at UNC-Charlotte, by Rob Singh-Latulipe.

Designing the Digital Future: Highlighting Informatics Work in the Arts and Humanities

Search “informatics” on Wikipedia and you’ll get a hint of the very wide swath that this relatively new field has already cut: bioinformatics, irrigation informatics, legal informatics, music informatics, cheminformatics, and disease informatics are just a few of its subfields. An idea that has been around for barely a half century...
2014 Imagining America PAGE Fellows

Reflections on Imagining America from UI’s PAGE Fellows

Moving the Middle — Reflections on Imagining America’s national conference by Heather Draxl: The theme of this year’s Imagining America conference, held in Atlanta, Georgia, was “Organizing. Culture. Change.” Those three words were intended to “represent concentrations of energy and activity across higher education and within the IA consortium” and played a role in one of the conference’s primary...
Crescendo poster

Obermann-Incubated Project Comes to a Crescendo

Masks give us permission to explore new ideas or to more bravely enact ways of being that we don’t usually give ourselves permission to pursue. They invite playfulness, humor, parody, and even a bit of mischief. Think Halloween costumes and masquerade balls. All of the qualities that masks allow and invite also make them a clever tool for exploring social issues, which is the aim of a new UI...
Bruce Gronbeck

Remembering Longtime Obermann Scholar Bruce Gronbeck

In January 1986, just days before the nation and the University of Iowa were scheduled to celebrate Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday for the first time, the Obermann Center was asked if we could “put together something” as part of the University’s observance. I was panicked, but then remembered that Bruce Gronbeck, a new guy at the Obermann Center, had been talking at...
One of thousands of photos that have been digitized as part of the Ft. Madison Prison Memory Project.

Incarcerated in Iowa - Relationship Forged at the Obermann Graduate Institute Results in Prisons Project and Symposium

Conversation Begins at Obermann Graduate Institute: Kathrina Litchfield, recent SLIS grad and a current PhD candidate in Language, Literacy, and Culture (College of Education) and Gemma Goodale-Sussen (English, CLAS) met for the first time last January as Fellows of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. As they shared their respective public engagement projects, each woman...

Recent Events

Scrutinizing the Shelves: Banned Books — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Scrutinizing the Shelves: Banned Books — An Obermann Conversation

Thursday, October 5, 2023 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

Recently, there has been an escalation of book bans and censorship in public school classrooms and libraries across the U.S. Many of the current book ban campaigns target books by or about LGBTQIA+ persons and people of color. In this Obermann Conversation, an outreach librarian, two scholars of education, and the director of a local cultural institution will discuss the history of book bans in the Midwest as well as nationally, and look forward to a future with access to books for all.

Panelis...

Get Concrete About Abstracts — An Obermann Get It Done Workshop promotional image

Get Concrete About Abstracts — An Obermann Get It Done Workshop

Wednesday, October 4, 2023 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

The conference abstract is a surprisingly difficult academic genre. How do you explain your project and entice your reader with only a couple hundred words? In this Get It Done lunchtime workshop, Hyaeweol Choi (Professor, Religious Studies & Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies) and E. Cram (Professor, Communication Studies & Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies) will discuss how to write a compelling conference abstract that will grab the attention of conference selection committees. Both...

Out of the Archive: S. Torriano Berry Horror Trilogy Film Screening promotional image

Out of the Archive: S. Torriano Berry Horror Trilogy Film Screening

Tuesday, October 3, 2023 6:30pm
FilmScene (Chauncey)

Please join us at FilmScene this fall for a monthly screening and discussion series, Out of the Archive: Envisioning Blackness. A continuation of conversations begun last spring in the inaugural Out of the Archive program, the series showcases the vibrant, multifaceted tradition of Black cinema by presenting rarely screened and/or recently restored films. Tickets are pay-what-you-can (with students, in particular, encouraged to pick $0). Join us before each screening for a free dinner reception...

Obermann Humanities 3MT (3-Minute Thesis) Competition promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3MT (3-Minute Thesis) Competition

Thursday, September 28, 2023 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

The Obermann Center's 2023 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) will take place from 3 to 5 p.m on Thursday, Sept. 28 at the Iowa City Public Library. 

This 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences in three minutes or fewer. The presented research can be a student’s thesis or PhD work, research related to an internship or...

Canceled
McGranahan Lecture Jelani Cobb promotional image

McGranahan Lecture Jelani Cobb

Tuesday, September 26, 2023 7:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Against the backdrop of a pandemic that disproportionately affects Black people, and a renewed push for racial justice, historian and Peabody Award-winning journalist Jelani Cobb emerges as a clear voice in the fight for a better America. A PBS Frontline correspondent for two critically acclaimed documentaries—Policing the Police and Whose Vote Counts—Cobb explores the enormous complexities of race and inequality, while offering guidance and hope for the future. A long-time writer for The New...

Closing Reflections - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium promotional image

Closing Reflections - Sports, Power, and Resistance Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium

Saturday, September 23, 2023 2:30pm to 3:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This the closing session of the Sports, Power, and Resistance: Legacies and Futures Obermann Arts and Humanities Symposium. 

Free and open to all.