On Thursday, March 2, at 2:30 p.m. CST, Professors Tara Bynum (English, CLAS) and Kabria Baumgartner (History and Africana Studies, Northeastern University) will discuss Bynum's new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), which tells the stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. Bynum, a 2021 recipient of the Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop...

Join us for a conversation between two University of Iowa students and three key figures of Our Bodies Ourselves, the legendary collective that published the groundbreaking text Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1969. This organization has continued to advocate for reproductive justice—developing powerful and inspiring models of health communication, medical education, legal advocacy and literary publishing on the body. Please register for the webinar-style conversation and Q&A, which will range wide and...

The Obermann Center seeks a graduate student to support the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, Humanities for the Public Good (HPG), under the supervision of the Director of the Obermann Center, who is the Principal Investigator on the project. The ideal candidate should be an outstanding scholar-teacher who is interested in conducting and sharing research on the larger ecosystem of the humanities and diverse careers for humanities scholars and learning the skills necessary to be a successful...

Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance “My Electric Genealogy” explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles and the American West through the lens of her own family.  “For nearly 40 years my grandfather worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, designing, planning, and supervising the network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of electricity,” Kanouse explains. “The grid was his...

Join us in conversation with journalist, comics artist, and Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor Joe Sacco, (Safe Area Gorazde, Paying the Land) interviewed by Rachel Williams for a talk about race, war, identity but also about his personal creative process and the art of comics.  This is part of a three-day event devoted to "Drawing Panels and Crossing Borders: Negotiating Self and Other in Comics" with MariNaomi, Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and Jose Alaniz. Organized by the...

For the next "Racial Reckoning Through Comics" event, we will engage in conversation with artists MariNaomi and Joe Sacco as well as scholars Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and José Alaniz to discuss how colonial dynamics are involved in racialization processes. From the global to the local, from international conflicts to the everyday life in times of peace, our artists’ stories and our scholars’ analyses will explore how the grammar of comics can imagine, write, and draw anti-racist and anti...