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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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...

News

Obermann center house

Fall 2012 Fellows-in-Residence

The Obermann Center welcomes its Fall 2012 Fellows-in-Residence next week. Six UI faculty members and one UI graduate student will work on projects ranging from the historical relationship between humans and mosquitoes in the Upper Mississippi River Basin to mathematical problems in X-ray dark-field tomography. The Fellows include the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship...

Taking a Page from Industry to Clean Up Drinking Water

There is more in that glass of water you just drank than meets the eye. Caffeine, perfumes, ibuprofen, and hormones are just a few of the pollutants that are not regulated and for which wastewater plants do not commonly treat. Known as “emerging contaminates,” these pollutants are accepted largely because there is no clear way to remove them. And so we all drink them regularly. What if we could...
Lisa Heineman

Working Group Members Perform and Gain an Award

Lisa Heineman (History and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies) and Kim Marra (Theatre Arts and American Studies) formed one of the inaugural 2011 Obermann Working Groups in order to explore how scholars might communicate their academic interests through performance and artists might use researchers’ methods to explore issues they usually address before live audiences. As scholars, Marra and...

Illustrating Plutarch

Artist Katie Merz and author John D'Agata first met nearly ten years ago when they were at the MacDowell Colony, the famed artists' colony in New Hampshire. More recently, they reconnected when both had residencies in Marfa, Texas. "I was making acetate pieces in which I took text from things I was reading and threw it into old cartoons," says the Brooklyn-based Merz whose style comes in part from...

Burial Mounds Focus of Weeklong NEH Grant Preparation

John Doershuk, Iowa's State Archaeologist, will lead a group this week (June 25-29) at the Obermann Center to prepare for an NEH Collaborative Research Grant. The group, which includes participants from the State Archaeologist's Office, UI faculty, and representatives from American Indian tribes, is seeking to advance investigation of prehistoric mound building. Ancient burial mounds appear to be...

Two Obermann Scholars Awarded Public Engagement Grants

Chuck Connerly, Urban & Regional Planning, Graduate College and co-director of the Obermann Graduate Institute, and Karla McGregor, Communications Sciences & Disorders, CLAS, and a Spring 2011 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, have received Public Engagement Grants (PEG) via the Office for the Vice President for Research. These competitive awards, which are in their inaugural year, are...

Recent Events

February 9-11: Racial Reckoning through Comics promotional image

February 9-11: Racial Reckoning through Comics

Thursday, February 9 6:30pm to Saturday, February 11, 2023 6:00pm
Iowa City Public Library/UI Obermann Center

For the next "Racial Reckoning Through Comics" event, we will engage in conversation with artists MariNaomi and Joe Sacco as well as scholars Candida Rifkind, Jorge Santos, and José Alaniz to discuss how colonial dynamics are involved in racialization processes. From the global to the local, from international conflicts to the everyday life in times of peace, our artists’ stories and our scholars’ analyses will explore how the grammar of comics can imagine, write, and draw anti-racist and anti...

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session promotional image

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session

Monday, January 23, 2023 3:00pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

Note: This event has been canceled. Please email obermann-center@uiowa.edu if you would like more information about the Humanities Lab opportunity.

The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good Initiative invites applications from UI faculty and partners to design a Humanities Lab. We define a “Lab” as an applied, experiential approach to teaching and learning at the graduate level that offers graduate students meaningful ways to connect advanced studies in the humanities with both a social...

Canceled
Anna Barker: “Why Mozart? Why Women? Why Now?” promotional image

Anna Barker: “Why Mozart? Why Women? Why Now?”

Wednesday, January 18, 2023 5:30pm to 6:30pm
University Capitol Centre

Professor Anna Barker (Asian & Slavic Languages & Literatures, UI) will share her enthusiasm for the music of Mozart and the Cedar Rapids Opera production of Cosí fan tutte: The Soap Opera, which will be performed on the following dates: 

Jan. 20, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 22, 2023 at 2 p.m.

At the Paramount Theatre in Cedar Rapids (123 3rd Ave SE).

The lecture is organized by the interdisciplinary Opera Studies Forum (via the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies), and is free and open to...

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom) promotional image

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom)

Thursday, January 12, 2023 10:00am to 12:30pm
Virtual

This series of two workshops will focus on best feedback and commenting practices to help students improve their writing and their learning. Faculty from different fields will lead presentations and discussions on the following topics:

Commenting on intermediate and final stages of writing projects Teaching commenting and feedback skills to TAs Designing effective peer review sessions Developing and implementing criteria for student self-assessment of writing

Vickie Molloy from the...

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom) promotional image

2023 Winter Institute for Teaching with Writing (via Zoom)

Tuesday, January 10, 2023 10:00am to 12:30pm
Virtual

This series of two workshops will focus on best feedback and commenting practices to help students improve their writing and their learning. Faculty from different fields will lead presentations and discussions on the following topics:

Commenting on intermediate and final stages of writing projects Teaching commenting and feedback skills to TAs Designing effective peer review sessions Developing and implementing criteria for student self-assessment of writing

Vickie Molloy from the...

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session promotional image

HPG Summer '23 Humanities Labs Application Info Session

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 11:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

The Mellon Humanities for the Public Good Initiative invites applications from UI faculty and partners to design a Humanities Lab. We define a “Lab” as an applied, experiential approach to teaching and learning at the graduate level that offers graduate students meaningful ways to connect advanced studies in the humanities with both a social challenge and skills valued in multiple career settings. The Lab grant will be awarded to one or more faculty members from humanities or humanities-adjacent...