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

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Why Anne Frank Still Matters—An Obermann Conversation

Monday, October 18, 2021 5:00pm to 6:00pm
Virtual

For several generations, Anne Frank has been a household name—the WWII diarist whose posthumously published book has been translated into more than 70 languages. But do younger generations know her story? When they encounter her, what resonates with them?

In this conversation, we'll consider Anne's legacy and the ways her experience as a refugee, a person in hiding, an advocate for human rights, and a joyful creative spirit can speak to new generations.

Speakers will include:

Kirsten Kumpf...
Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 2

Friday, October 8, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

How do we respond to and evaluate student writing, including multimodal work, without overwhelming ourselves and our students? This session, the second in a series of two workshops on teaching with writing, will focus on prioritizing course and assignment goals to respond to and grade student writing. It will offer a repertoire of strategies for giving feedback at various stages of the writing process across a range of media from handwriting to digital audio-video. These include designing...

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences promotional image

Working the Humanities: Humanities Graduate Students Share Their Internship Experiences

Tuesday, October 5, 2021 4:00pm
Virtual

While internships are an established part of professional and science graduate programs, they have been a less common opportunity for humanities graduate students. Now, departments and universities are realizing the many benefits for encouraging humanities graduate students to participate in workplace learning. These experiences provide students with a chance to apply their skills, ranging from archival research to critical analysis, to workplaces outside of the academy. Internships bolster...

Esteban and the Children of the Sun promotional image

Esteban and the Children of the Sun

Sunday, October 3, 2021 3:00pm
The Englert

Esteban and The Children of the Sun is a musical suite that imagines and interprets the tricontinental journey of Esteban of Azemmour, the 16th-century Moroccan explorer and first documented African to travel across the North American lands of present-day southwestern United States.

A multi-media production combining music with dialogue, images and projected text, Esteban and the Children of the Sun follows the 2016 musical project, Hot Tamale Louie, a multi-genre collaboration between composer...

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis

Friday, October 1, 2021 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Virtual

The Obermann Center's 2021 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) will take place on Friday, October 1, 2021, from 4:00–5:30 p.m. on Zoom.

Our 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 other outside...

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1

Friday, October 1, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Creating Meaningful Writing Tasks: Breaking Assignments into Smaller Parts

How do we design meaningful formal writing assignments that engage and motivate our students?  How do we use smaller writing-to-learn tasks that scaffold and prepare them for those formal assignments as well as inform us instructors how they are learning what we are teaching?  How do we build multimodal elements into assignments to expand meaning-making opportunities? 

This workshop will focus on designing and...