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,...

Recent Events

Institute for Teaching with Writing promotional image

Institute for Teaching with Writing

Thursday, January 21, 2021 10:00am
Virtual

This series of four two-hour workshops is an introduction to teaching with writing. Topics include creating engaging writing assignments, responding to student writing efficiently and effectively, and using informal writing and peer workshops. Registration now open

NOTE: All instructors welcome, but this series is primarily designed for instructors teaching content-oriented courses (i.e. courses in the social sciences, history, art, philosophy, and the natural sciences) rather than writing...

Institute for Teaching with Writing promotional image

Institute for Teaching with Writing

Tuesday, January 19, 2021 10:00am
Virtual

This series of four two-hour workshops is an introduction to teaching with writing. Topics include creating engaging writing assignments, responding to student writing efficiently and effectively, and using informal writing and peer workshops. Registration now open

NOTE: All instructors welcome, but this series is primarily designed for instructors teaching content-oriented courses (i.e. courses in the social sciences, history, art, philosophy, and the natural sciences) rather than writing...

Food Insecurity in Johnson County: An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Food Insecurity in Johnson County: An Obermann Conversation

Thursday, January 14, 2021 7:00pm
Virtual

As of five years ago, about 14% of Johnson County residents were considered food insecure, meaning that they had limited or uncertain access to certain and nutritious food. After nearly a year of COVID-19 affecting employment and housing, those numbers are much greater. In this conversation, Obermann Center Teresa Mangum will talk with panelists about how food insecurity is experienced by UI students, children and families in our local schools, and others who are grappling with this urgent issue...

Institute for Teaching with Writing promotional image

Institute for Teaching with Writing

Thursday, January 14, 2021 10:00am
Virtual

This series of four two-hour workshops is an introduction to teaching with writing. Topics include creating engaging writing assignments, responding to student writing efficiently and effectively, and using informal writing and peer workshops. Registration now open

NOTE: All instructors welcome, but this series is primarily designed for instructors teaching content-oriented courses (i.e. courses in the social sciences, history, art, philosophy, and the natural sciences) rather than writing...

Institute for Teaching with Writing promotional image

Institute for Teaching with Writing

Tuesday, January 12, 2021 10:00am
Virtual

This series of four two-hour workshops is an introduction to teaching with writing. Topics include creating engaging writing assignments, responding to student writing efficiently and effectively, and using informal writing and peer workshops. Registration now open

NOTE: All instructors welcome, but this series is primarily designed for instructors teaching content-oriented courses (i.e. courses in the social sciences, history, art, philosophy, and the natural sciences) rather than writing...

Peer-to-Peer Exchange of Pandemic Teaching Practices promotional image

Peer-to-Peer Exchange of Pandemic Teaching Practices

Tuesday, December 15, 2020 3:30pm
Virtual

Even as many of us long for a return to an in-person, on-site work life, we’ve also been learning valuable new practices—for teaching, for meetings, for collaboration, and more. Over the next few months, the Obermann Center will be collecting Pandemic Practices to share, beginning with new practices developed for teaching and learning, practices we want to remember and refine in the months to come. To inspire you, we’re offering Prairie Lights gift certificates at the end of the year for the...