Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar promotional image

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

The Research Development Office is hosting an in-person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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...

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News

Comics in the Library, Museum and Classroom - Rachel Williams and Corey Creekmur Make a Case for Comics in Academia

Comics: Their Time Has Come — Three years ago, Corey Creekmur (Cinema & Comparative Literature and English, CLAS) and Rachel Williams (Art & Art History and GWSS, CLAS) and their colleague Ana Merino (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS) co-directed a highly successful Obermann Humanities Symposium, "Comics, Creativity, and Culture." The three-day event fostered dynamic exchanges between notable creators and...
Hadrian's Wall_0.jpg

Wall to Wall

Standing on the Great Wall of China in 1991, Mohammad Chaichian wondered at the feat of architecture and engineering that extended in front of him as far as he could see. Although the wall was ostensibly built to keep out nomadic “barbarians,” Chaichian, a sociology professor with training in architecture and urban planning, wondered how those on the other side, the so-called barbarians, viewed it...
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Obermann Part of Major Collaborative Mellon Award

Obermann Center Member of Major Collaborative Mellon Grant The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $3,000,000 for an innovative two-year project, “Humanities Without Walls,” that will include faculty and graduate students at the University of Iowa. In addition to the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the collaboration includes fourteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond. By...

The Heart of the Chicago Humanities Summit

The following reflections on the recent Chicago Humanities Summit were written by H. Glenn Penny (History, CLAS), who was one of several University of Iowa faculty members in attendance. On January 9, 2014 the Chicago Humanities Festival (CHF) joined forces with the Modern Language Association (MLA), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), and local humanities centers along with the...

Micromagnets: On the Path To Greater Energy Efficiency

Johna Leddy (Chemistry, CLAS) is very enthusiastic about the possibility of improving electrochemical systems such as batteries and fuel cells to provide energy and fuels with greater efficiency. “We might be able to build a low temperature fuel cell that runs on alcohol,” says Leddy, who was a Fall 2013 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence. “It could make us less dependent on foreign oil and processes...

Obermann Fellows in Conversation—Race Relations in the U.S. South

A wonderful aspect of the Obermann Center is the way in which people from across the University meet and have unexpected conversations. While many of our programs invite people to form unique collaborations to achieve a specific outcome, such as publishing an article or developing a grant application, our longest running program, the Fellows-in-Residence, is intended to support individual projects...

Recent Events

What Happens When Robots Write? - A talk by Bill Hart-Davidson promotional image

What Happens When Robots Write? - A talk by Bill Hart-Davidson

Monday, September 24, 2018 4:00pm to 5:30pm
English-Philosophy Building

Did a robot write this blurb? How might we know? And most importantly, can we live, together, with robots who write? In this talk, Bill Hart-Davidson, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Michigan State University, will address that last question to those of us who make our living by reading and writing, and teaching others to read, write and speak well, ethically, with grace and creativity...

2019 Graduate Institute on Engagement & the Academy Info Session promotional image

2019 Graduate Institute on Engagement & the Academy Info Session

Friday, September 14, 2018 9:00am to 10:00am
111 Church Street

Learn about the Graduate Institute and ask questions of a former graduate fellow. Obermann Center Assistant Director Jennifer New will lead the session.

If you are interested in applying for the January 2019 Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, please attend!

Free and open to all.

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)...