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...

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.

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News

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...
Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson challenges higher education to consider--The Way We Perform Now

At the 2014 Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, Shannon Jackson, Goldman Chair in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California-Berkeley, stole a very impressive show as she previewed the book she is writing with a Guggenheim fellowship: The Way We Perform Now. We are delighted that Jackson is coming to the UI for a public talk on Wednesday, March 24 from 3:30-5:00 at the...

Smoke-Screen: Dance Performance Explore Themes of the Anthropocene

Smoke-Screen Debuts as Finale of Anthropocene Symposium Jennifer Kayle (Dance, CLAS; pictured left) has spent the past few months immersed in books like Diane Ackerman’s The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us and Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, as well as works about how complex science can be effectively communicated to a broader public. This research has been...
A chemical synapse releasing neurotransmitters.

On the Trail of Parkinson’s — Jon Doorn Seeks Clues to Stop Neurodegenerative Disease

The second most common neurodegenerative disease is Parkinson’s Disease (PD). It affects more than 1 million Americans and 10 million people worldwide. The cause of this prevalent disease remains largely unknown. Genetics play a role but cannot account for all cases. While age is one contributor, it isn’t clear whether Parkinson’s comes with age or...
HWW logo

UI Faculty and Grad Students Selected for Humanities Without Walls Opportunities

The Obermann Center is delighted to be a member of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Without Walls consortium, led by the University of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities. Already, our graduate students and faculty are benefiting from this innovative partnership. Note: A second round of applications will be invited soon for summer 2015 seed grants. In fall 2015, we...
Michael Hill, photo by The HawkEye

Follow the children: Michael Hill views the adolescent character as a weathervane

In a 1949 poem, Gwendolyn Brooks asked, “What shall I give my children? . . . / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land . . . ” The question is central to Michael Hill’s new book, A Little Child Shall Lead Them: Adolescence in African American Novels, 1941-2008.Hill, a University of Iowa professor of English and African American Studies and Fall 2014 Obermann Fellow in Residence, is curious...

Recent Events

Visioning and Calendars: Project Management Basics—A Get It Done Workshop promotional image

Visioning and Calendars: Project Management Basics—A Get It Done Workshop

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 12:00pm to 1:00pm
111 Church Street

You have an idea for a project or an event, but is it a good one? That is, is it good enough to be worth the time, expense, and effort that will go into it? Once you land on a project idea, how do you bring it to fruition? In this lunchtime workshop, we’ll work on project visioning, which can be helpful in fine tuning an existing project as well as identifying a new one. We’ll also try our hands at backwards calendaring. You’ll leave with a roadmap for completing your project.

This workshop...

Digital Bridges Symposium - FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC promotional image

Digital Bridges Symposium - FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Wednesday, August 8 to Friday, August 10, 2018 (all day)
MERGE

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

With generous support from our institutions and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College/University of Iowa Partnership has been a fascinating, rewarding, and instructive experience in collaboration, digital pedagogy, and digital humanities practice. Our August 8-10 Digital Bridges Symposium will bring together faculty, staff, and students from both institutions and digital scholars from across the country as we...

Latina/o/x Studies Today — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Latina/o/x Studies Today — An Obermann Conversation

Friday, July 20, 2018 3:00pm to 4:00pm
MERGE

Theorists Vargas, Mirabal, and La Fountain-Stokes (2017) describe Latina/o/x Studies as “an amalgamation of multiple disciplines, theories, and methods” that “has generated an expansive, innovative, and ever-evolving framework to understand the experiences of persons of Latin American and Caribbean descent in the United States as well as broader sociohistorical, political, and cultural processes.” The speakers below, all of whom are in town participating in the weeklong Iowa Workshop in Latina/o...

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered—2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium promotional image

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered—2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Wednesday, April 4, 2018 to Saturday, April 6, 2019 (all day)

Disability is a universal human experience. Like gender, race, class, and sexuality, disability affects everyone in multiple ways, shaping and informing our notions of normality, family, community, fitness, and worth. Disability Studies, one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences and health sciences, examines abilities in the context of societies and cultures as they change over time. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed)...

Publicizing Events: An Obermann Get It Done! Workshop promotional image

Publicizing Events: An Obermann Get It Done! Workshop

Tuesday, October 3, 2017 12:00pm to 1:00pm
111 Church Street

Get It Done is a new BYO Brown Bag Lunch series about getting work done efficiently and with style. Bring your lunch and join the fun!

Are you bringing a visiting lecturer to campus year, planning a symposium, or organizing an exhibit? Whether your event is one-hour long or three days, you are probably hoping for an audience. Jennifer New, who heads up Obermann's communications team, will share strategies for publicizing events on campus and in the community. Learn about publicity calendars...