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

Stephanie Miracle

UI professor Stephanie Miracle on the demands and rewards of interdisciplinary work

Stephanie Miracle’s ensemble is large. Mechanical engineers, musicians, hydroscientists, robots, zoological specimens, filmmakers, parking ramps, at least one professor of 18th-century literature, and the Iowa River all have found a place in collaborations honored this year by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies.
Walter Biggins

Six questions for Walter Biggins, our 2026 editor-in-residence

You’ve worked for a number of robust institutions in the last fifteen years. Do you feel the role of a university press has changed in campus life since you began your career? If so, what do you see as the most important ways that presses can engage and support their intellectual ecosystems today, beyond publishing books?

I started in university-press publishing in September 1999, so the number is closer to (ulp!) 27 years. In that timespan, I’ve worked for three presses: University Press of Mississippi, University of Georgia Press, and now University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press).

Amy Hildreth Chen

Meet our new assistant director, Amy Chen

Hi, Amy! So happy to sit down with you after your first few weeks on Church Street. I was hoping we could talk about Iowa first—it’s played a significant role in your academic history. Could you talk a little about your journey and how you’ve come to the Obermann Center?

Sure! I went to Iowa as an undergraduate, double majoring in English and political science. I was drawn to campus from my hometown of Wichita, Kansas, by Iowa’s reputation as the Writing University. I did all sorts of things as an undergraduate. I was a resident assistant, Writing Fellow, editor-in-chief of the undergraduate literary magazine, and research assistant on top of writing an honors thesis and taking graduate classes in English. After graduation, I really needed a break! I went away to travel, then pursued my PhD at Emory University and completed a postdoc at the University of Alabama.

IDRG group working

Variants of Uncertain Significance

“I suppose what’s always speaking to me in the back of my mind is my mother,” says Benjamin Darbro. “She’s really the one who inspired this problem solving.” My question to University of Iowa professors John Manak, of the Department of Biology (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) and Darbro, of the Stead Family Department of Pediatrics (Carver College of Medicine), was about the nature of their work: What is your relationship to complexity?
headshot dempsey

Meet Reid Dempsey

Hi, Reid! You’re the new program coordinator at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (OCAS). Can you explain your role?

Hi! Certainly. It’s a blend of responsibilities, but mostly communications support. I help with interviews, social media, outreach, and recordkeeping. I’m also learning from the Obermann staff—Jenna, Erin, Amy, and Luis—how an organism like OCAS supports research and intellectual life inside and outside the University of Iowa. Their combined experience and skill set can be a little dazzling, and the work feels special. Not every school has something like the Obermann Center on campus, dedicated to sharing resources, building networks, and thinking about the best ways to make things happen.

Bella Spilotro

Behind the Zines: Learning from Artists at Public Space One

This summer, I had the pleasure of interning at Public Space One (PS1), an artist-led, community-driven contemporary art center, for eight weeks as a student intern supporting grant administration, research, documentation, and publication development for the multi-year Alongside/Banned but Not Silenced project.

Recent Events

How Do We Look?: Racial Reckoning through Comics promotional image

How Do We Look?: Racial Reckoning through Comics

Friday, September 9 10:00am to Saturday, September 10, 2022 5:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

This event is part of the 2022-23 Mellon Sawyer Seminar, "Racial Reckoning through Comics." In addition to a year-long intensive seminar with local participants, this Sawyer Seminar will feature a series of public presentations by prominent visiting creators and scholars, a film series, workshops, podcasts, and other public events, all of which will critically engage questions of racial representation in the popular international formats of comics.

To begin our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar...

Book Ends Information Session promotional image

Book Ends Information Session

Wednesday, September 7, 2022 3:30pm to 4:30pm
Virtual

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books Ends—an Obermann/OVPR 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 in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books. Read more about the program. 

Interested applicants are invited to learn more about...

E Cram's Book Launch: "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West" promotional image

E Cram's Book Launch: "Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West"

Friday, September 2, 2022 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Virtual

In this virtual event, E Cram (Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies) will read from their new book, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West. 

The book deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. Cram redefines sexual modernity through...

A Yellow Rose Project (Exhibition) promotional image

A Yellow Rose Project (Exhibition)

Thursday, September 1 to Friday, September 30, 2022 (all day)
Art Building West

The UI Photography Program, in partnership with the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and Gender, and Women’s and Sexuality Studies, welcomes A Yellow Rose Project to the School of Art and Art History. Including work by over 100 women, the project is a photographic collaboration of responses, reflections, and reactions to the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in the United States.

The photographs in this collection express a rich, broad...

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session II promotional image

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session II

Friday, August 12, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently.

Register at writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing 

Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session I promotional image

Fall Institute for Teaching with Writing: Session I

Thursday, August 11, 2022 10:00am to 12:00pm
Virtual

This series of two virtual, interactive workshops is designed for instructors interested in incorporating more writing into their courses. Topics include designing meaningful writing assignments, informal writing-to-learn activities, and responding to and evaluating student writing effectively and efficiently.

Register at https://writingcenter.uiowa.edu/institute-teaching-writing

Organized and facilitated by the Teaching with Writing Obermann Working Group. Sponsored by the Writing Center, the...