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

stef shuster: Transgender Activist, Academic Pioneer

stef shuster recalls the frustration experienced when filling out the Institutional Review Board (IRB) application to conduct graduate research.“It was very formulaic, and so many of the questions were constructed in a binary way,” says the 29-year-old University of Iowa doctoral student in sociology who is conducting research on transgender communities and identities—and whose name is...

Lobbying for the Humanities

As director of the Obermann Center, I often represent the University of Iowa at national meetings. In March, I headed to Washington, D.C. to the annual meeting National Humanities Alliance (NHA) and its Annual Advocacy Day along with Colin Gordon, UI professor of history, and Derek Willard, Special Assistant to the President and Associate VP for Research in the UI Office of Governmental Relations...

Kathleen Diffley

What would you learn about the current war in Afghanistan if you were to take as your sources several current magazines, say People, The New Yorker, and Newsweek? The story that would come into focus from such disparate sources may not offer a complete timeline of events, but it would provide a sense of what the people reading those publications cared about: a soldier’s homecoming, an intimate...

Graduate Institute Fellows Present at Jakobsen Conference

The culmination of each year's Graduate Institute is for participants to create a project that combines some aspect of their research and/or teaching with a community-based issue or organization. This year's Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows will present their projects at this year's Jakobsen Graduate Conference on March 24 from noon to 5:00 at the IMU. The Graduate Fellows' projects include a...

Was the Word: Crossing the Line

Crossing Borders, a community storytelling project, crossingborders.us, started by Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows Raquel Baker (English, CLAS), Ted Gutsche (Journalism, CLAS), and Daniel Kinney (Art Education, College of Education), will host this month's Was The Word. This is Working Group Theatre's monthly storytelling, poetry, and music show at the Englert Theatre, with benefits going to...

Udaykumar and the Solar Cooker Project

H.S. Udaykumar (Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering) had a chance coffee shop encounter with his friend and colleague, R. Rajagopal (Geography, CLAS), which became the first in a series of events that would dramatically change his life—down to what he eats and reads.“ I was at T-spoons, totally oblivious,” recalls Uday, “and Raj accosts me and announces, ‘You are going to India! There is...

Recent Events

Midwest Graduate Music Consortium Conference 2024

Saturday, April 6, 2024 8:00am to 9:00pm
Virtual

The 28th annual meeting of the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (MGMC) will be hosted by the University of Iowa on April 6-7, 2024. This conference will feature paper presentations, a new music concert by the University of Iowa New Music Center, and a keynote address by Dr. Eric Saylor, Professor of Musicology at Drake University.

MGMC is a joint venture organized by graduate students from the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and the University of...

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies, Keynote Presentation promotional image

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies, Keynote Presentation

Friday, April 5, 2024 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

On April 5 from 4 to 5 p.m. Dr. Lena Hill will deliver the 23rd annual Craft Critique Culture interdisciplinary graduate conference keynote presentation in the Academics Room of the Iowa Memorial Union (IMU, Room 256). Dr. Hill is the provost at Washington and Lee University. Before working at Washington and Lee she was a faculty member and administrator at the University of Iowa where she taught in the English and African American Studies Departments. She is the author of Visualizing Blackness...

Campus and Local Community Spaces as Collaborative Lab for Environmental Research—Inspiration from Leaders at Other Campuses promotional image

Campus and Local Community Spaces as Collaborative Lab for Environmental Research—Inspiration from Leaders at Other Campuses

Friday, April 5, 2024 1:30pm to 3:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

Around the country, visionary faculty members and administrators are finding inspiring ways to engage students, artists, researchers, staff, and community partners in learning about and responding to climate change and its environmental effects through the very landscapes in which they live and work. As part of this year’s Obermann series, “Envisioning Interdisciplinary, Experiential Environmental Research,” we are thrilled to welcome two leaders whose brilliant cross-sectoral, cross...

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies promotional image

Craft Critique Culture Graduate Conference: Black Legacies

Friday, April 5, 2024 12:00pm

On April 4–6, 2024, English graduate students are hosting the 23rd annual Craft Critique Culture interdisciplinary graduate conference on the University of Iowa campus. This year’s conference addresses themes of “Black Legacies.” For this conference, “Black Legacies” is, first, a recognition and continued contribution to the history of Black Studies programs in colleges and universities, which emerged in the 1960s and ’70s. “Black Legacies” is also a way to honor and celebrate the power of...

Second Language Acquisition Graduate Symposium

Friday, April 5 to Saturday, April 6, 2024 (all day)
Virtual

Attending and presenting at this two-day event is an excellent opportunity for graduate students to gain experience presenting their own research, as well as meeting other researchers with similar interests.

This year’s conference will be in a blended format. Presenters and attendees can attend virtually or in person. This format invites graduate students from the host institutions (the University of Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin-Madison), within the United States, and internationally.

Title...

Celebrando Nuestra Herencia: A Conversation with Bilingual Community Leaders promotional image

Celebrando Nuestra Herencia: A Conversation with Bilingual Community Leaders

Thursday, April 4, 2024 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Celebrando Nuestra Herencia: a conversation with bilingual community leaders. 

This event is hosted by the Spanish Heritage Speakers in the Classroom Obermann Working Group.