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

Informational Meeting for Summer Humanities for the Public Good Internships promotional image

Informational Meeting for Summer Humanities for the Public Good Internships

Wednesday, December 18, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Learn about the Summer 2020 Humanities for the Public Good Internship program. In addition to learning about the opportunities, expectations of participants, application process, you will also have the chance to talk with one of last year's interns and hear about their experience. 

Obermann Conversations Program: Domestic Stories promotional image

Obermann Conversations Program: Domestic Stories

Thursday, November 14, 2019 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

How have relationships between domestic workers and employees changed over time, including around issues of race and gender? What are issues of pay injustice that have been true in the past and how are workers addressing such issues today? This Obermann Conversation includes a historian, a feminist podcaster, and a labor expert.

Catherine Stewart, a history professor from Cornell College and an Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, is working on a book, The New Maid: African American Women and Domestic...

Fascism and Anti-fascism, 1920-2020 – A talk by Geoff Eley promotional image

Fascism and Anti-fascism, 1920-2020 – A talk by Geoff Eley

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 12:30pm to 1:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, will give a talk titled "Fascism and Anti-fascism, 1920–2020." Sponsored by the Obermann Working Group Circulating Cultures, Eley will pull from his extensive work in German and British history. Eley is interested in both the history of the Left and the history of the Right; history and film; historiography; and history and theory. He has recently begun teaching a large new...

Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1920-2020 promotional image

Fascism and Anti-Fascism, 1920-2020

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 12:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

A free, public lecture by Dr. Geoff Eley
Professor of History, University of Michigan

Latina/o/x Citizenship and National Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium) promotional image

Latina/o/x Citizenship and National Belonging (Sawyer Seminar Symposium)

Friday, November 8, 2019 (all day)
Iowa City Public Library

For this one-day symposium -- part of our yearlong Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar on “Imagining Latinidades: Articulations of National Belonging” -- three speakers will address the ways Latina/o/x communities are integrated into and respond to dominant U.S. political and cultural social practices. Speakers will provide a strong historical foundation, attend to political processes, and draw out some of the less formal ways in which citizenship is imagined and practiced in Latina/o/x...

Stacey Abrams: Assuring Free and Fair Elections in 2020 promotional image

Stacey Abrams: Assuring Free and Fair Elections in 2020

Monday, November 4, 2019 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

Stacey Abrams lost a tightly contested battle for Georgia Governor amid controversy over voters' access to the polls. She has since founded Fair Fight 2020 with the aim of assuring free and fair elections. Join us for Stacey's presentation, along with a campus and community dialogue about the state of voter rights going into the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 

This event is part of the UI 100th commemoration of the 19th amendment series, which reflects on and celebrates the 100th anniversary...