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

Rewiring the Classroom

Teaching Teachers About Technology: This month, college educators are uniting at the University of Iowa to discuss the digital classroom, as well as teaching others how to use the powerful tools of the 21st century. On February 23, 2013, “Rewiring the Classroom,”a forum on digital practices and philosophies for the college classroom, will take place at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and will...

Chicago Humanities Festival / ACLS Fellowship

Public Engagement Opportunity: The Chicago Humanities Festival has been selected as a host institution for the 2013 Public Fellows Program of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). The Mellon-funded initiative will bring two recent humanities PhD into the Chicago Humanities Festival organization, each serving as Program Manager for a period of two years (July 2013 through July 2015). This...

MOOCs: History, Hype, and Reality, a talk by VPR Dan Reed

Vice President for Research Dan Reed Launches Obermann Afternoons—occasional informal presentations on recent discoveries, compelling research questions, and current events. The New York Times declared 2012 "The Year of the MOOC" citing recent multi-million dollar ventures that make college and university courses available to large audiences via...

Judith Pascoe

In 2003 when Judith Pascoe (English, CLAS) joined an Obermann Cmiel Research Semester, “Sounding the Voice,” she had a topic in mind but did not anticipate that it would become the center of her work for the next few years. Several years later, The Sarah Siddons Audio Files won the prestigious Barnard Hewitt Book Award from the American Society for Theatre Research. The award was a major stamp of...

Author Luis Alberto Urrea Reads from New Novel

Author Luis Alberto Urrea will read from his new novel, Queen of America, during a reading on December 11 at 7 pm at The Englert Theatre. Urrea will be joined by Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, fellow writer and co-director of The Latino Midwest, the 2012-13 Obermann Humanities Symposium. Urrea was born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother....

2013 Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows

Eighteen UI graduate students from across campus, representing four different colleges, have been selected for the seventh annual Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. This year's co-directors, Carolyn Colvin (Teaching & Learning) and Charles Connerly (Urban & Regional Planning), and Senior Graduate Fellow Eric Zimmer (History) will lead the weeklong program from January 14-18...

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...