Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar promotional image

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

The Research Development Office is hosting an in-person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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

Rasheedah Liman

Rasheedah Liman: Bridging Continents Through Eco-Theatre

This spring, we welcomed—and recently bid a regretful farewell to—Rasheedah Liman, director, playwright, and Professor of Theatre and Performing Arts at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Radiating enthusiasm from the moment she arrived, Rasheedah immersed herself in the UI theatre community and in discussions with faculty across the university. Liman is a scholar and practitioner of eco-theatre, a theatrical form that, in her words, "recognizes the potential of theatre to contribute to environmental consciousness, with the goal of harnessing the transformative power of the stage to engage audiences, evoke emotional responses, and promote environmental awareness."
Gabriela Roman Fuentes

Narrating Pain, Shaping Poetics: Gabriela Román Fuentes Drafts Novel and Play during Obermann Fellowship

Eleanor Ball
This spring, we welcomed Obermann International Fellow Gabriela Román Fuentes, an award-winning Mexican author, to campus. Her research centers on the representation of illness and female bodies in contemporary Latin American literature. “I am interested in the way diseases are depicted and how authors address pain and intimacy in their writing, as well as how bodies and illnesses have shaped their work,” Fuentes explains. “I regard illness and female bodies not only as mere topics, but also as a structural device and/or a maker of their Poetics.” This research is the foundation for two of Fuentes’s new creative projects, a novel about a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease and a play about hysteria.
abstract human face with ear emphasized

Learn about Listening at Obermann’s May 8 Research Blitz

Eleanor Ball
This year’s Wide Lens event, Obermann’s annual celebration of research on campus, will center the theme of listening. The May 8 event at the Voxman Music Building will bring together researchers from science, social sciences, the humanities, and the arts to investigate what it means to listen deeply and thoughtfully. “Listening attentively is crucial to much of what we do as scholars, researchers, and practitioners,” says Luis Martin-Estudillo, Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. “It requires will and skill, and the six colleagues presenting on their work are fantastic at both, each one from a very different disciplinary platform.”
Eleanor Ball at UI Main Library

Eleanor Ball Lands Faculty Position at UNI!

Congratulations to Obermann Communications Assistant Eleanor Ball, who has secured two extraordinary library positions for the coming year! In May, Eleanor will graduate from the UI with a Master of Library & Information Science degree and will begin remote work as a Junior Fellow with the Library of Congress Center for Learning, Literacy, and Engagement. As part of the Center’s Literary Initiatives team, which develops literary programming and administers literary ambassadorships, Eleanor will help to increase the visibility and accessibility of programs like the National Book Festival, promote awareness of the Library’s resources and services, and share with the public a diverse range of established and new literary voices. Then, in August, she’ll begin a three-year term with the University of Northern Iowa as Assistant Professor of Instruction & Information Literacy and Liaison Librarian, where she’ll liaise with the library and academic departments across campus, as well as teach information literacy classes.
Cultivating Rurality logo

Rurality to be Focus of March 2026 Obermann Symposium

Eleanor Ball
Obermann Center for Advanced Studies
We’re pleased to announce the 2025-26 Obermann Symposium, “Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research,” co-directed by Daria Fisher Page, Brian R. Farrell, and Ryan T. Sakoda from the UI College of Law. “Cultivating Rurality” will take a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at the subject of rurality through the lenses of law, medicine, education, sustainability, business, social science, and the arts by connecting faculty members and others at the University of Iowa who are already engaged in rural research and teaching, as well as scholars, community leaders, and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces.
Middle-aged man with glasses and flannel

From Kosovo to Iowa: Ercan Canhasi Advances AI and Research Strategy in Underserved Nations

Eleanor Ball
This spring, we welcomed Obermann International Fellow Dr. Ercan Canhasi, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Prizren in Kosovo. He specializes in machine learning, natural language processing, and text mining, and his research includes developing language resources for underserved languages like Albanian. “While at the University of Iowa, I worked on a new research project with Professor Cassie Barnhardt, titled ‘Mapping Universities’ Research Capacity and ROI [Return on Investment] in Low-Expenditure R&D Nations,’” he shares. “The project aims to analyze how universities in countries with limited research funding can optimize their research output and institutional effectiveness.”
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Recent Events

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Reception promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Reception

Thursday, April 4, 2019 5:30pm to 7:00pm
MERGE

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "Family Misfits in the Frankenstein Ballet" promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "Family Misfits in the Frankenstein Ballet"

Thursday, April 4, 2019 4:15pm to 5:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Welcome by Tricia Zebrowski & Douglas Baynton promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Welcome by Tricia Zebrowski & Douglas Baynton

Thursday, April 4, 2019 4:00pm to 4:15pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium promotional image

Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered - 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium

Thursday, April 4 to Saturday, April 6, 2019 (all day)

Disability is a universal human experience. Like gender, race, class, and sexuality, disability affects everyone in multiple ways, shaping and informing our notions of normality, family, community, fitness, and worth. Disability Studies, one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields in the humanities, social sciences and health sciences, examines abilities in the context of societies and cultures as they change over time. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed)...

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium promotional image

Reading and Re-Translation - an international colloquium

Saturday, March 30, 2019 (all day)
University Capitol Centre

“Reading and Re-translation" is an international and interdisciplinary colloquium dedicated to the theorization and practice of reading. With funding from an International Programs Major Projects Award, organizers and speakers from around the globe will focus on the current state of research on reading and re-translation and will generate scholarly and creative exchanges between colleagues in diverse fields in the arts, sciences, literatures, and humanities.

The conference opens with a special...

Finding Yourself in Academia: A Diné Historian’s Experience promotional image

Finding Yourself in Academia: A Diné Historian’s Experience

Friday, March 29, 2019 1:30pm to 3:00pm
University Capitol Centre

The Graduate History Society welcomes...

Dr. Farina King
Assistant Professor of History
Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Dept
Northeastern State University
Tahlequah, Oklahoma

Dr. Farina King is an assistant professor of history and affiliate of the Cherokee and Indigenous Studies Department at Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and received her Ph.D. from Arizona, her M.A. in African History from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. from Brigham Young University with a...