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

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...

Civic Science - Beyond the Knowledge Wars

John Spencer, director of "Get Ready Iowa," the 2012 Obermann Summer Seminar, and Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, published this article in the Huffington Post on May 31. An abbreviated version appeared in the Iowa City Press Citizen on June 12. Today, we face multiplying global crises—from economic collapse to global warming to crises in education and...

Civic Science at Center of Summer Seminar

A new kind of research is at the heart of this June’s Obermann Summer Seminar. Based on a model of civic science, the seminar will bring together educators, developmental scientists, policy makers, and parents to consider how to improve school readiness for Iowa’s three- to five-year olds.“We are trying to stay very open to possible outcomes,” says John Spencer, Director of the DeLTA Center and...

Kevin Chamberlain's "Insect" Exhibit Opens

“Insects: A Collection in Multiple Dimensions”—featuring artwork by University of Iowa graduate student Kevin Chamberlain—opens May 3 at 5 p.m. in the UI Pentacrest Museums Gallery for the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences at the Old Capitol Museum.The exhibit includes digital photographs and three-dimensional artistic renderings of specimens from the UI Museum of Natural History’s 100-year-old...

Raquel Baker and Ted Gutsche

Raquel Baker (English, CLAS) and Ted Gutsche (Journalism and Mass Communication, CLAS) met via the Obermann Graduate Institute. Today, the two PhD candidates are using their mutual interests in civic engagement and social justice to create a General Education Literature course that takes students into the local community to find "concealed stories" and share them with a broader audience. One of the...

Recent Events

Wide Lens: WATER - interdisciplinary research exchange & conviviality at the Stanley Museum of Art promotional image

Wide Lens: WATER - interdisciplinary research exchange & conviviality at the Stanley Museum of Art

Thursday, December 1, 2022 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Stanley Museum of Art

Inspiration & exchange across the disciplines

For each gathering in the new Wide Lens series, scholars and/or artists from across the university will briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest (pecha kucha–style), and then open the floor to questions and discussion over food and drink at the ever-inspiring Stanley Museum of Art.

Wide Lens is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for...

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament promotional image

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

Quality childcare is an elemental need. It allows parents to work at paid jobs, which in turn helps to support the economic well-being of our communities. Equally as crucial, it provides early childhood development for the next generation.

Anyone who has tried to find quality childcare, however, knows that it is not easy to find—or very affordable. In the past five years, Iowa has lost more than a third of its childcare providers, and the cost of child care amounts to 15.3% of the average Iowa...

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried promotional image

Reimagining Criminal Justice Systems Through Eyes that Have Cried

Wednesday, November 16, 2022 6:00pm to 7:00pm
Old Capitol Museum

British lawyer Alexander McLean, the founder of Justice Defenders (formerly African Prisons Project), will discuss his work transforming communities, justice systems, and countries from inside out. Sponsored by the UI Lecture Committee, Center for Human Rights, College of Education, School of Music, International Programs, Citizen Lawyer Program, and Obermann Center supported Prison Writing Project.

The event will also be livestreamed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2Dq6K-wUjE 

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America" promotional image

POROI Seminar: Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"

Friday, November 11, 2022 2:30pm to 4:00pm
111 Church Street

UPCOMING POROI SEMINAR (!)
Dr. Eric Vázquez, "States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries of Revolutionary Central America"
 
Dr. Vázquez will be circulating the introduction to his book, States of Defeat, for us to workshop with him! He writes, “After over a century of international political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked on the twenty-first century and discerned that revolutionary struggle, previously an instrument for seizing an emancipated future, had somehow run aground. My book, States of...

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics promotional image

Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics

Friday, November 4 10:30am to Saturday, November 5, 2022 4:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

To continue our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar devoted to “Racial Reckoning Through Comics,” we turn to critical and creative approaches to representing historical as well as potential futures of racial trauma, testimony, possibility, and expanded narrative. How have comics neglected as well as addressed racialized histories or imagined racialized futures? In addition to presentations from our dynamic speakers, this event will include a guided archival tour of rare comics artifacts from the...

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop promotional image

Application deadline: Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop

Tuesday, November 1, 2022 5:00pm

Launched in 2015 as an initiative of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, this annual workshop welcomes 30 participants each summer from higher education institutions across the United States. HWW Summer Workshop Fellows work in a variety of academic disciplines. They are scholars and practitioners who bring experience in community building, museum curation, filmmaking, radio programming, social media, project management, research, writing, and teaching. They are invested in issues of...