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

Obermann Conversations Program: Domestic Stories promotional image

Obermann Conversations Program: Domestic Stories

Thursday, November 14, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

How have relationships between domestic workers and employees changed over time, including around issues of race and gender? What are issues of pay injustice that have been true in the past and how are workers addressing such issues today? This Obermann Conversation includes a historian, a feminist podcaster, and a labor expert.

Catherine Stewart, a history professor from Cornell College and an Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, is working on a book, The New Maid: African American Women and Domestic...

Fascism and Anti-fascism, 1920-2020 – A talk by Geoff Eley promotional image

Fascism and Anti-fascism, 1920-2020 – A talk by Geoff Eley

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, will give a talk titled "Fascism and Anti-fascism, 1920–2020." Sponsored by the Obermann Working Group Circulating Cultures, Eley will pull from his extensive work in German and British history. Eley is interested in both the history of the Left and the history of the Right; history and film; historiography; and history and theory. He has recently begun teaching a large new...

Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1920-2020 promotional image

Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1920-2020

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 12:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

A free, public lecture by Dr. Geoff Eley
Professor of History, University of Michigan

Latina/o/x Citizenship and National Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Citizenship and National Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, November 8, 2019 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

For this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- three speakers will address the ways Latina/o/x communities are integrated into and respond to dominant U.S. political and cultural social practices. Speakers will provide a strong historical foundation, attend to political processes, and draw out some of the less formal ways in which citizenship is imagined and practiced in Latina/o/x...

Stacey Abrams: Assuring Free and Fair Elections in 2020 promotional image

Stacey Abrams: Assuring Free and Fair Elections in 2020

Monday, November 4, 2019 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Stacey Abrams lost a tightly contested battle for Georgia Governor amid controversy over voters' access to the polls. She has since founded Fair Fight 2020 with the aim of assuring free and fair elections. Join us for Stacey's presentation, along with a campus and community dialogue about the state of voter rights going into the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

This event is part of the UI 100th commemoration of the 19th amendment series, which reflects on and celebrates the 100th anniversary...

Black Curators' Roundtable promotional image

Black Curators' Roundtable

Monday, October 28, 2019 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This event marks the end of the exhibition Anonymous Donor, guest-curated by Anaïs Duplan and shown at the Figge Art Museum as a part of the Stanley Museum of Art collections-sharing program, Legacies for Iowa, sponsored by the Matthew Bucksbaum Family. Join Duplan and curators Gia Hamilton, Eileen Isagon Skyers, and Gee Wesley in a moderated conversation about their practice working in multiple exhibit, artistic, and community contexts.

Black Curators' Roundtable is organized by the Center for...