Upcoming Events & Deadlines

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar promotional image

Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities Seminar

Thursday, January 14, 2027 8:30am to 12:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

The Research Development Office is hosting an in-person grant writing seminar, Planning and Writing Successful Grant Proposals in the Creative Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities, that will be held on Wednesday, Jan. 13 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. and Thursday, Jan. 14 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the IMU. The seminar is presented by AtKisson Training Group.

This seminar will cover fundamental concepts of proposal planning and writing for the Arts and Humanities faculty backed by concrete...

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 to Stop Giving Graduate Students Bad Advice: Mentoring Workshop promotional image

How to Stop Giving Graduate Students Bad Advice: Mentoring Workshop

Friday, May 17, 2019 9:00am to 4:00pm
English-Philosophy Building

This interactive workshop asks formal and informal mentors of graduate students in the humanities and across the humanistic disciplines to take stock of the short and long term impact of the advice offered by departments, faculty members, and others. How would mentoring change if we started with the premise that “being a professor” was only one — and an increasingly less likely — reason to undertake advanced studies in the humanities?  If we thought of mentoring as a shared responsibility for...

Scoring the Screen: The Power of Music in Film promotional image

Scoring the Screen: The Power of Music in Film

Wednesday, April 17, 2019 4:00pm
Iowa City Public Library

How do composers, producers, and directors use music in film? How does it help to tell stories, complicate plots, create atmosphere, and manipulate audiences' emotional responses? How is it selected, scored, and recorded? Join Kaitlyn Busbee (independent filmmaker), Corey Creekmur (Professor of Cinematic Arts), Rebecca Fons (Programming Director at FilmScene), and Nathan Platte (Professor of Music) as they discuss the role—and the power—of music in film.

Kaitlyn Busbee is an independent...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Closing Roundtable Reflections promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium: Closing Roundtable Reflections

Saturday, April 6, 2019 4:15pm to 4:45pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "Cultural Representation of Idiocy in a Modernist (Eugenic) Era" promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "Cultural Representation of Idiocy in a Modernist (Eugenic) Era"

Saturday, April 6, 2019 3:00pm to 4:15pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Panel: Technology + Arts + Design: Retrofitting Worlds and Bodies promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Panel: Technology + Arts + Design: Retrofitting Worlds and Bodies

Saturday, April 6, 2019 1:30pm to 2:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "504 and Beyond: Disability Politics and the Black Panther Party" promotional image

Misfitting Humanities Symposium Lecture: "504 and Beyond: Disability Politics and the Black Panther Party"

Saturday, April 6, 2019 11:15am to 12:30pm
Iowa City Public Library

On April 4-6, the 2019 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Misfitting: Disability Broadly Considered, will bring leading disability scholars from diverse disciplines to discuss the relevance and importance of disability to their respective fields. The symposium will consider the pervasive (though often unnoticed) influence of disability on and in the performing, visual, and literary arts, in philosophy and religion, in political and economic life, and in everyday language, as we explore when and how...