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

Designing the Digital Future - A Symposium Summary

Designing the Digital Future – A Symposium Summary To many, informatics means big data. But as the 2014 Obermann Working Symposium, “Designing the Digital Future: A Human-Centered Approach to Informatics,” November 7-8, 2014, demonstrated, informatics technology intersects with narrative, the arts, collaborative learning, dance, diversity, narrative, social justice movements, values sensitive...

2015 Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows Selected

The following students have been selected for the 2015 Obermann Graduate Institute. As Obermann Graduate Fellows, they will participate in a one-week intensive institute exploring how to combine public engagement with their research and teaching. The Institute, now in its ninth year, is co-directed by Barbara Eckstein (English, CLAS) and Craig Just (Civil and Environmental Engineering), with...

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...

Recent Events

Latina/o/x Migration (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Migration (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, October 25, 2019 (all day)
MERGE

In this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- three invited speakers will explore questions related to migration and national belonging. Each speaker will deliver a plenary address, which will be followed by Q&A.

Speakers include the following: Karma Chávez is Associate Professor and Chair of Mexican American & Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a rhetorical...

The Burden of Gun Violence: Trends and Policy Solutions promotional image

The Burden of Gun Violence: Trends and Policy Solutions

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 7:00pm to 9:00pm

This event brings together a panel of experts to discuss the burden of American gun violence and the potential for evidenced-based public policy solutions.

The PPC’s Crime & Justice Policy research program, directed by Mark Berg, is hosting this panel as part of the Run Up to the 2020 Caucus – a series designed to examine different policy topics that will be discussed during the campaign.

Topics will include:

Lethal and non-lethal gun violence trends in the United States Gender and gun...
Conversation: A Vital Tool for Mending Our Democracy promotional image

Conversation: A Vital Tool for Mending Our Democracy

Wednesday, October 23, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Many of us long for complex conversations with a greater range of people, and yet we aren't entirely sure how to access such conversations. In this Obermann Conversation, we convene three people -- Lore Baur, Ben Hassman, and Sherry Watt -- who actively organize and facilitate conversations that might be perceived as difficult. Each of them will share some of the skills involved in holding a mutually respectful and beneficial conversation, as well as some of the power that this relatively simple...

Latino/a/x Identity, Popular Culture, & Arts Education: A Visit From Poet José Olivarez promotional image

Latino/a/x Identity, Popular Culture, & Arts Education: A Visit From Poet José Olivarez

Tuesday, October 22, 2019 (all day)

Poetry Workshop with José Olivarez
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
12:30-1:30pm
UCC 2750
Lunch will be provided | Limited to first 20 registered UIowa students
Sign-up by October 12 at tinyurl.com/JOlivarez

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Poetry Reading with José Olivarez
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
6pm
Latino Native American Cultural Center

More information on acclaimed-poet and author of Citizen Illegal (2018) at:

www...

Media Clown: The Analog Clown Enters Digital Space promotional image

Media Clown: The Analog Clown Enters Digital Space

Monday, October 14, 2019 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

Paul Kalina (Theatre Arts, CLAS) and Daniel Fine (Digital Arts Cluster) share their project "Media Clown," which premiered in June at the Prague Quadrennial. The event is the largest festival of stage and theatrical design in the world. The project includes two motion-capture suits and a holographic effect screen, all of which aid in Kalina's clown character (think Keaton, not Bozo) "entering" an iPad and becoming part of the digital world.

The two began planning the project during a Summer...

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...