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...

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News

Memorializing the Cold War, One Ambiguous Site at a Time

Memorializing the Cold War One Ambiguous Site at a Time: How should the Cold War be memorialized? This question forms the backbone of the Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant project of Sarah Kanouse (Art & Art History, CLAS) and Shiloh Krupar (Geography, Georgetown University).Through their “wishful federal agency,” The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service,” also known as the National...

Imagining America: A Call to Action

A group of nine University of Iowa faculty members, graduate students, and staff attended the Imagining America conference in Syracuse, New York from October 4-6, 2013, "A Call to Action."Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life is a consortium of universities and organizations dedicated...
David L. Gould (Headshot)_1.jpg

Dave Gould Is First Obermann Public Scholar

Though we tend to associate scholarship with the work of campus faculty members, knowledge creation also has strong roots in our communities. The Obermann Center is piloting a Public Scholar program designed to enhance research on campus through partnerships that engage University of Iowa researchers with innovators outside the University. As Obermann...
Herman Gray

Herman Gray Visit Stems from Obermann Cmiel Semester

Herman S. Gray, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will give a public lecture on October 18, 2013, “On Race, Representation, and Resonance,” in Becker Auditorium, Room 101, at 4:00 pm. His lecture engages with the way scholars of television and race often take representation as the site of subject/ion and visibility as the object of cultural politics. Gray asks if...
Nouveau recueil d’ostéologie et de myologie : dessiné d’après nature / par Jacques Gamelin

Health Humanities Planning Sessions

We will host two informal planning sessions for University of Iowa faculty and staff who are interested in next April's Health Humanities Working Symposium. (We are having two meetings in order to accommodate schedules.) If you would like to learn more, to participate in the event, or to meet colleagues working across these domains—from medical anthropologists and historians to poets writing about...

Translating Ixtlilxochitl’s Thirteenth Relation

At the death of an Aztec king, two brothers contest their father’s throne. A civil war ensues and ends with the kingdom divided in two. A number of years later, a Spanish conquistador named Cortés arrives in the area and one brother sends him an offer: I’ll help you if you help me. With the Spaniard’s assistance, the one brother is deposed, while the other not only takes the throne but fights...

Recent Events

Public Forum for Obermann Center for Advanced Studies Director Candidate: Naomi Greyser

Friday, February 23, 2024 2:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Naomi Greyser, associate professor of American Studies, English and Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies, will deliver a presentation and participate in a Q&A as a candidate for the Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (OCAS). 

Greyser serves as executive director of POROI, Iowa’s Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. In her research, teaching and service, Greyser engages the process of knowledge creation, with an eye towards making space for messiness and unpredictability. Her first...

Book Matters: Margot Livesey in conversation with Lan Samantha Chang at Prairie Lights promotional image

Book Matters: Margot Livesey in conversation with Lan Samantha Chang at Prairie Lights

Monday, February 19, 2024 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Prairie Lights Books

Join us for a reading and discussion, co-sponsored by Prairie Lights, to celebrate Margot Livesey’s new novel, The Road from Belhaven. Livesey is professor of fiction in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of 10 other books. After the reading, Lan Samantha Chang, Writers’ Workshop program director and Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts, will join Livesey for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. Appetizers and wine will be available.

              Monday, Feb. 19, 2024
      ...

Imagining Community in 2030: An Obermann Conversation promotional image

Imagining Community in 2030: An Obermann Conversation

Monday, February 19, 2024 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

What will our community be like in 2030? How are local nonprofits shaping the Iowa City area, and what are their visions for the future? How can we break down the silos of “city” and “neighborhood” to create a better and more unified place for everyone? In this Obermann Conversation, UI faculty and local nonprofit leaders will discuss how we can harness the collective impact model to create a more equitable community. The collective impact model is a community-building strategy involving a...

Application Deadline: What She Said — A Workshop on Empowering Women’s Voices promotional image

Application Deadline: What She Said — A Workshop on Empowering Women’s Voices

Friday, February 16, 2024 5:00pm

Our voices are an important indicator of who we are. Female-presenting speakers often learn self-undermining speaking habits from the people and society around them. How does the voice contribute to our sense of presence and how others perceive us? Tone, inflection, pace, and volume are some of the vocal elements that provide clues for the listener as to what we think and feel.

In this workshop, UI Theatre Arts professor Mary Mayo will invite you to develop a greater awareness of your voice and...

Beyond Speech and Representation: Insights from Child Psychotherapy about the Materiality of Learning promotional image

Beyond Speech and Representation: Insights from Child Psychotherapy about the Materiality of Learning

Friday, February 16, 2024 1:00pm to 3:00pm
Seamans Center

Dr. Gail Boldt is a former University of Iowa faculty member and is now a distinguished professor of education at Penn State. She teaches graduate seminars in cultural and critical theory as it relates to contemporary issues in education. At the undergraduate level, she works in elementary and early childhood program literacy education. Dr. Boldt is the Senior Editor of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series. She is also a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist, trained in providing play...

Sharing Energy for Climate Communications: Improv and Embodied Activities promotional image

Sharing Energy for Climate Communications: Improv and Embodied Activities

Friday, February 16, 2024 10:00am to 12:00pm
Seamans Center

Benjamin Stasny is joining us from Colorado University at Boulder, where he is a PhD candidate studying the intersection of queer futurity, climate communication, and improvisational pedagogy. While in grad school, Ben has developed workshops that use theatrical techniques for sharing energy and sustaining hope in the face of climate change. He has led these workshops in Boulder, Chicago, London, and now Iowa City. Please use the Google form linked above to register for this event (limit 30...