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

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...

2014 Graduate Institute Fellows

Seventeen UI graduate students have been selected as Obermann Graduate Fellows and will participate in the 2014 Obermann Graduate Institute. The Institute is a highly competitive program for graduate students across the University who are interested in developing publicly engaged dimensions for research, arts, and teaching. The weeklong Institute (January 13-January 17, 2014) includes...

Obermann Grad Fellow Combines Biking Advocacy and Research

Mark Pooley jokes that many people think that winter bike riding is only for the “strong and the fearless.” As someone who rides his bike most days, he acknowledges that even the strong and fearless sometimes look outside on a zero-degree wind chill morning and have second thoughts about riding to work. But what the former Obermann Graduate...

A Year in the Life of the Obermann Center

In the last academic year, the Obermann Center directly served 139 faculty, staff, and graduate students as Fellows-in-Residence and Affiliated Scholars. These participants represent 46 different University of Iowa departments and units and 10 colleges. In addition, hundreds of people from across campus, the greater Iowa City area, and throughout the state attended our programs. Here is just a...
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New Film Celebrates the Humanities

"The more technologically sophisticated we are, the more deeply we need to understand one another. [We need] to teach people empathy, because empathy does not come naturally; to encourage curiosity in broad and diverse ways. And the humanities does those things," says Obermann Director Teresa Mangum in a new film, The Centrality of the Humanities, produced by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the...
Charles Darwin

Internationally Renowned Darwin Biographer to Speak

Exploring Darwin's Motives: Why did Charles Darwin, a rich and impeccably upright gentleman, go out of his way to privately develop a subversive image of human evolution in 1837-39? Why did he pursue the subject with tenacity for three decades before publishing The Descent of Man in 1871? Internationally renowned Darwin biographer James Moore will address these questions and others in his lecture,...
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Recent Events

Application Deadline: Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium Director (2023–24) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium Director (2023–24)

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 5:00pm

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Arts & Humanities Symposium!

These imaginative half- and whole-day symposia connect the arts and humanities with design, politics, health sciences, environmental studies, technology, and other disciplines via a compelling topic...

Microheterotopias: Chemistry Meets Glassblowing promotional image

Microheterotopias: Chemistry Meets Glassblowing

Friday, October 21, 2022 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Chemistry Building

“Desperate to solve chemistry’s greatest problem, Justus Liebig made the first Kaliapparat in 1830. That small piece of glassware started something big. The Kaliapparat made Liebig’s name. But lampworked glassware transformed chemistry. Ever since, chemists have used other worlds in glass—the Microheterotopias of my title—to manage matter. Making Microheterotopias relies on skilled scientific glassblowers. This talk explains what happened when chemistry met glassblowing—and why that connection...

"Medea." An Introduction. Opera Studies Forum

Thursday, October 20, 2022 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Phillips Hall

Prof. emeritus Robert Ketterer (Classics, University of Iowa) will introduce the opera "Medea" by Luigi Cherubini (first perf. 1797) and its production in this season by the Metropolitan Opera with streaming in theaters on Oct. 22. 

Revising Injustice: Emphatically Anti-racist Comics promotional image

Revising Injustice: Emphatically Anti-racist Comics

Wednesday, October 12, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

This event has been canceled.

Canceled
Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis promotional image

Obermann Humanities 3-Minute Thesis

Thursday, September 29, 2022 4:00pm to 5:00pm
111 Church Street

The Obermann Center's 2022 Humanities Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition will take place on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022, from 4 to 5 p.m. at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (111 Church St.). It will be an in-person event, free and open to all. Please support our humanities graduate students and attend!

This 3MT is specially designed to feature the work of UI humanities graduate students. The event challenges graduate students to articulate their complex research clearly and concisely...

Works on Memory: Concepts and Projects - Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France promotional image

Works on Memory: Concepts and Projects - Memorial to the Abolition of Slavery in Nantes, France

Thursday, September 29, 2022 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Virtual