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

Summer Institute on Cross-Disciplinary Graduate Education promotional image

Summer Institute on Cross-Disciplinary Graduate Education

Tuesday, June 8 3:00pm to Friday, June 11, 2021 12:00pm
Virtual

How can cross-disciplinary, project-based courses serve graduate students across the University? This question is under investigation at the University of Iowa by both the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good PHD initiative and the National Science Foundation NRT-Funded Sustainable Water Development Graduate Program as well as implicitly in interdisciplinary degrees in many corners of the University.

In the past decade, groups of UI faculty members have taught “Big Ideas”...

Black Lives on Screen: "Black Spring" (in 5 parts) promotional image

Black Lives on Screen: "Black Spring" (in 5 parts)

Thursday, May 6, 2021 7:00pm to 10:00pm
Virtual

Showcasing the work of a diverse range of acclaimed African American and Black filmmakers, artists, and scholars, the Black Lives on Screen online screening series and discussions will promote and celebrate the rich history, present, and future of Black cinematic expression in the context of an inclusive, educational, and inspiring experience for the entire UI community.

Event Information: 
Black Spring (in 5 parts) “poetic conversation in film” pre-recorded performance by Professor Tracie...

Grant Writing with Mary Blackwood — An Obermann Get It Done! Workshop promotional image

Grant Writing with Mary Blackwood — An Obermann Get It Done! Workshop

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

You have a great project in mind, but you need funding to implement it. Maybe you’ve even identified an opportunity for grant funding, but how do you write a grant that will get funded? What do the grant reviewers look for in a proposal? How do you give yourself an edge in the application process? Mary Blackwood, Senior Sponsored Research Specialist at the UI Division of Sponsored Programs, will share her advice and take questions on the topic of grant writing.

All are welcome at this free...

Moderated Conversation with Cathy Park Hong promotional image

Moderated Conversation with Cathy Park Hong

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 5:30pm to 6:30pm
Virtual

Poet, writer, professor, and Iowa Writer’s Workshop alumna Cathy Park Hong will engage in a moderated conversation with members of the University of Iowa focused on her book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020).

This event will follow a series of reading roundtables and will be the keynote address for this year’s UI Asian Pacific American Heritage Month celebration. A Q&A will follow for the audience to engage with Cathy Park Hong.

Graphic Histories: A Discussion with Rachel Williams and Karlos Hill promotional image

Graphic Histories: A Discussion with Rachel Williams and Karlos Hill

Thursday, April 15, 2021 11:30am to 12:30pm
Virtual

Two scholar-artists will share their experience with translating historical research to a graphic form. Rachel Williams recently published two books, Run Home If You Don't Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (University of North Carolina Press), which uses incorporating firsthand accounts collected by the NAACP, and Elegy for Mary Turner (Penguin Randomhouse), a haunting depiction of American racial violence and lynching. Hill, who directs the African and African American Studies...

Approaches to Inclusive Graduate Admissions: Workshop with Dean Todd Butler promotional image

Approaches to Inclusive Graduate Admissions: Workshop with Dean Todd Butler

Friday, April 2, 2021 1:00pm to 3:00pm
Virtual

In collaboration with CLAS and the Graduate College, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good initiative will host Interim Dean Todd Butler (Washington State University College of Arts & Sciences) for a reprisal of a workshop he recently held for the Modern Language Association on inclusive admissions. During the virtual workshop, Dean Butler will describe how Washington State University redesigned admissions in response to students’...