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

Performing Latina/o/x Futurity (Sawyer Seminar Closing Conference) promotional image

Performing Latina/o/x Futurity (Sawyer Seminar Closing Conference)

Friday, May 1 to Saturday, May 2, 2020 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

In this closing conference for the Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar, six invited scholars of Latina/o/x studies help wrap-up the yearlong conversation about “Imagining Latinidades.” We make the turn to practices of performing and imagining Latinidades now and into the future by inviting leading scholars in the fields of Performance Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, and Latina/o/x Studies to participate in a closing conference. One set of speakers will discuss Latina/o/x cultural...

Canceled
Performing Latina/o/x Futurity (Sawyer Seminar Closing Conference) promotional image

Performing Latina/o/x Futurity (Sawyer Seminar Closing Conference)

Thursday, April 30 to Saturday, May 2, 2020 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

In this closing conference for the Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar, six invited scholars of Latina/o/x studies help wrap-up the yearlong conversation about “Imagining Latinidades.” We make the turn to practices of performing and imagining Latinidades now and into the future by inviting leading scholars in the fields of Performance Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, and Latina/o/x Studies to participate in a closing conference. One set of speakers will discuss Latina/o/x cultural...

Canceled

Postponed (Future Date TBD): Climate Change Literacy Teach-In — Earth Day 2020

Wednesday, April 22, 2020 9:30am to 4:20pm
Old Capitol Museum

NOTE: This event has been postponed, with a future date to be determined.

The Sustainability Charter Committee is organizing a Climate Change Literacy Teach-In, to be held on Earth Day, April 22, on campus. Professor Jerry Schnoor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, will provide a keynote address.

Earth Day Climate Change Literacy Teach-in Schedule Senate Chamber, Old Capitol 9:30 Jerry Schnoor 50 Years Since Earth Day: A Climate Emergency 10:10...

CANCELED: Humanities for the 21st Century: A conversation

Wednesday, April 15, 2020 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Old Capitol Museum

Update 3/11/2020: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.

 

 

Latina/o/x Cultural Citizenships & Popular Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Cultural Citizenships & Popular Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, March 27, 2020 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

After having addressed issues surrounding formal citizenship and national belonging in the previous semester, this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- will bring subject area experts to discuss modalities of popular belonging (television, sports, music, literature, and more) in Latina/o/x contexts in the U.S.

Speakers include the following: Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and...

Canceled
The Art & Science of Attention — An Obermann Conversation promotional image

The Art & Science of Attention — An Obermann Conversation

Wednesday, March 25, 2020 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

NOTICE: This event has been postponed. We hope to reschedule soon. Please check back.

Please join us for this free, public Obermann Conversation about attention and focus. We are living in an age of distractibility. Understanding how our brains attend and focus, as well as what we can do to cultivate attention, is necessary for our effectiveness and happiness. 

Shaun Vecera's (Psychological and Brain Sciences) overarching work attempts to understand the basic yet complex mechanisms of...

Canceled