Upcoming Events & Deadlines

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...

View more events

Spacer

News

Dave Gould

To the Class of 2019 - Inspiration from Obermann Public Scholar Dave Gould

David Gould, Obermann Public Scholar, is spending this fall semester introducing University of Iowa undergraduates to a cast of amazing, inspiring visitors. From a master storyteller from The Moth and musicians from the Cirque du Soleil , to the co-founder of Girls on the Run and the creator of an online funding company, this eclectic group of guests will help students consider what makes for a...
Dickens Universe

Opportunities for Grad Students at Obermann

The Obermann Center offers a growing number of opportunities for UI graduate students—from courses to a research assistantship. As we begin the 2015-16 academic year, we wanted to provide an overview for students, as well as for faculty advisors and graduate directors. Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy This year, we celebrate the 10th anniversary of our signature program, the...
collinsfamily-3771 (2).jpg

Philosopher Promotes Everyday Practice of His Field—And Lands Dream Job

“The Institute [on Engagement and the Academy] really pushed me to figure out what civically engaged scholarship looked like,” says Brian Collins. “It was—and sometimes still is—difficult for me to wrap my head around how my scholarship as a philosopher could directly apply to and benefit from this kind of work.” That has not stopped Collins from imagining ways to share philosophy and its...
6a00d8341c464853ef016304bd6b51970d.jpg

Medieval Scholars Get Messy with NEH Manuscript Production Seminar

Most of what we know about the literature, art, and science of the Middle Ages has been interpreted by scholars from texts hand-scribed on parchment. And though they return to these illuminating manuscripts for more clues, few scholars deeply understand the process of their production. Providing scholars with hands-on experience is the central...
cGVmfc78cKREeztg-Zo-RvKAZGO_cQXQDFoPSfJI3Ts.jpg

Scenes from Anthropocene Symposium

Several keynote lectures from the 2014-15 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Energy Cultures in the Age of the Anthropocene were filmed and are now available on the Obermann's YouTube channel. Lonnie Thompson: "Climate Change: The Evidence and Our Options"; Jennifer Kayle and UI dancers: "Smoke-Screen: This and Other Warnings"; Charles Mann: "Energy and Climate: A Problem from Hell"...
Schoenberg Self Portrait

The Allure of Concision — Matthew Arndt’s Fascination with Schoenberg’s Shortest Works

“Concise!” In 1909, the composer Arnold Schoenberg wrote to a friend, “My music must be short. Concise! In two notes, not built, but ‘expressed.’ And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.” This call to simplification marked the beginning of a two-year period of radically unconventional music, even compared with his earlier nontonal music. This period...

Recent Events

Free Film Screening: La Bamba (1987)

Thursday, October 10, 2019 5:30pm to 8:30pm
FilmScene

This free screening of the film La Bamba (1987) is part of the yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on "Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging." The screening will be followed with a post-discussion.

La Bamba is the biographical story of 1950s rock 'n' roll rage Ritchie Valens (born Ricardo Valenzuela), played by Lou Diamond Phillips. The film follows how the 17-year-old Californian went from farm-laborer to overnight success, including his untimely death in a...

Lisa Tetrault Book Reading promotional image

Lisa Tetrault Book Reading

Saturday, October 5, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Prairie Lights Books

Lisa Tetrault is Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in the history of U.S. women, gender, race, and American democracy. Her book, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898, traces the making of a story about the foundations of American feminism and interrogates that story’s political purposes, both inside and outside the movement. It won the Organization of American Historians’ women’s history book prize. Tetrault lectures...

“No Room for Maria at the Inn”: Race, Nation, and the Restriction of Maternity Care in El Paso, Texas, 1922-42 promotional image

“No Room for Maria at the Inn”: Race, Nation, and the Restriction of Maternity Care in El Paso, Texas, 1922-42

Friday, October 4, 2019 4:00pm
Schaeffer Hall

Dr. Heather Sinclair will be giving a lectured titled, "No Room for Maria at the Inn": Race, Nation, and the Restriction of Maternity Care in El Paso, Texas: 1922-42. 

Heather Sinclair is an Assistant Professor of History at Dixie State University. Her research focuses on the history of reproduction, midwifery, childbirth, and public health in the late nineteenth- and twentieth century US viewed through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism. She has a background in...

When Women Won the Right to Vote: An American Fiction

Thursday, October 3, 2019 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

A leading historian of the Women’s Rights and Suffrage Movement in the Nineteenth Century explores the myths associated with popular understandings of when, how, and why women initiated social movements for equal citizenship rights.

Obermann Humanities 3MT Competition promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3MT Competition

Friday, September 27, 2019 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

On Friday, September 27, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. at the Iowa City Public Library (Room A), the Obermann Center will host a Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition, especially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The 3MT competition challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely to non-specialist audiences; the goal of presenters is to present their research in three minutes or fewer. The winner of the Obermann Humanities...

How to Write Effective Letters of Recommendation: A Lunchtime Workshop promotional image

How to Write Effective Letters of Recommendation: A Lunchtime Workshop

Thursday, September 26, 2019 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

In this informal workshop, Obermann Center Director Teresa Mangum will share tips and advice on writing recommendation letters. Come with questions—and bring your own lunch!

This is an informal, lunchtime workshop that is part of the GET IT DONE! series. Everyone is welcome; no registration is necessary.