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

Working Groups Look Ahead to Second Year

2011-2012 has been the inaugural year for the Obermann Working Groups. This program, modeled on successful programs at several centers around the country, is intended to provide space, structure, and discretionary funding for groups of faculty and advanced graduate students with a shared intellectual interest. We have had four Working Groups this year: Intergenre Explorations, Women's Health and...
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Katie Porter's New Book Examines Effects of Consumer Debt

In 2008, Katie Porter (pictured below), then a UI College of Law professor, proposed a topic for the Obermann Summer Seminar on consumer debt in America. For two weeks the following summer, she and a group of eleven participant—including professors in law, psychology, urban and regional planning and medicine—met at Obermann to discuss different perspectives on this topic. Each participant came...

Interdisciplinarity is Focus of Obermann Workshop

Richard Handler, Director of the Program in Global Development Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia will lead a discussion on March 5 at 3:00 pm based on his career as a scholar, teacher and administrator whose work cuts across the geographical and disciplinary boundaries. This informal conversation -- "The Art of Interdisciplinarity" -- will take place in the...

Humanities and Public Life Series Announced

Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center, is co-editing a new book series for The University of Iowa Press with Anne Valk, Associate Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. Humanities and Public Life will feature books examining projects using the arts and humanities to promote community building and civic change. These...

18 Graduate Fellows Engage in Graduate Institute

The 6th annual Obermann Graduate Institute on Public Engagement and the Academy will have three more Graduate Fellows than in past years, thanks to additional funding from the UI Graduate College. This year's co-directors (shown at right), Rachel Williams (GWSS and Art & Art History) and Chuck Connerly (Urban & Regional Planning) will lead a group of students who hail from degree programs as...

Teresa Mangum Joins Imagining America Board

Obermann Director Teresa Mangum has been named to the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA). Imagining America is a consortium of universities and organizations dedicated to advancing the public and civic purposes of humanities, arts, and design. The UI has been a member for nine years. This year, the UI sent nearly 20 people, including...

Recent Events

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1 promotional image

Fall Institute on Teaching with Writing: Session 1

Friday, October 1, 2021 2:00pm to 5:00pm
Virtual

Creating Meaningful Writing Tasks: Breaking Assignments into Smaller Parts

How do we design meaningful formal writing assignments that engage and motivate our students?  How do we use smaller writing-to-learn tasks that scaffold and prepare them for those formal assignments as well as inform us instructors how they are learning what we are teaching?  How do we build multimodal elements into assignments to expand meaning-making opportunities? 

This workshop will focus on designing and...

What Is Critical Race Theory?: Perspectives from Business, Law, & Sociology promotional image

What Is Critical Race Theory?: Perspectives from Business, Law, & Sociology

Thursday, September 30, 2021 7:00pm
Virtual

On July 1, 2021, Iowa House File 802 became law. Though the Act does not specifically mention “Critical Race Theory,” CRT was cited in discussions of the Act, and the Act restricts when and where the framework’s historical, social, and legal tools for understanding race-based inequities may be taught. But what is critical race theory, and how has it become the focus of acts and editorials? On Thursday, September 30, at 7:00 p.m. CST, a legal scholar, a sociologist, and a community advocate for...

Seeing Asian American Life through the Video Essay promotional image

Seeing Asian American Life through the Video Essay

Thursday, September 23, 2021 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Virtual

Join us for a virtual panel and screening with video essayist Kevin B. Lee, whose work both demonstrates how one can use the arts, literature, theory, and history to offer an understanding of human experience—in this case, of Korean Americans and other ethnic groups—and illustrates a relatively new form of research, the video essay.

We will screen Lee's video essays, including Mourning with Minari and Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox (see descriptions below). Afterward, Lee will join...

Trans Health & Medical Care: Where We Are, Where We Came From: A (Virtual) Obermann Conversation promotional image

Trans Health & Medical Care: Where We Are, Where We Came From: A (Virtual) Obermann Conversation

Wednesday, September 22, 2021 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Virtual

Surfacing in the mid-twentieth century, yet shrouded in social stigma, transgender medicine is now a rapidly growing medical field. UI alumna and Michigan State University professor stef shuster shares findings from their new book, Trans Medicine (NYU Press, 2021) in discussion with Dr. Katie Imborek, co-founder of UIHC's LGBTQ Clinic, and community archivist and PhD candidate Aiden Bettine, whose work creates and demands gender-affirming community spaces.

Protests, Military Coup, and Burma's Future promotional image

Protests, Military Coup, and Burma's Future

Wednesday, September 22, 2021 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

Featuring Maxime Boutry, Associate Researcher, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris, France

The double crisis, political and sanitary, that Myanmar is currently undergoing, sheds new light on the political and social transformations that have affected the country over the last ten years. Whilst the February 1st military coup literally kidnapped the hopes of a whole generation of citizens thirsting for democracy, it also revealed a failed...

What Do We Mean by Humanities Research Now? — An Obermann roundtable promotional image

What Do We Mean by Humanities Research Now? — An Obermann roundtable

Friday, September 17, 2021 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

Across the country, humanities centers act as incubators for cutting edge questions, creative collaborations, publicly engaged projects, and experimental forms of humanities scholarship. To kick off our conversation about the challenges new forms of research pose to existing metrics, we’ve gathered directors of four humanities centers. Join us as they offer their perspectives on emerging humanities research questions, methods, and formats, and the challenges these pose to current metrics...