Upcoming Events
Application Deadline: Obermann End-of-Year Writing Retreat
Friday, March 13, 2026 5:00pm
Space, time, & collegial support for academic writing
"Rural Community-Centered Research: Maternity Care and Why It Matters" — Keynote lecture (in person and virtual) by Katy Kozhimannil, University of Minnesota
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 7:30am
Special Preliminary Event for the Obermann Symposium "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research."
This lecture, co-sponsored by the UI Carver College of Medicine, is designed for a non-clinical audience and will be open to the public. Katy B. Kozhimannil is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Co-Director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center and the University of Minnesota Rural Health Program.
The lecture will take place in Pediatric...
Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium
Thursday, March 26 to Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)
Directed by Brian R. Farrell, Daria Fisher Page, and Ryan T. Sakoda (UI College of Law), Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges...
"Reimagining the Rural from Idyll to Hinterland: Exhausting Rural Childhoods” — keynote lecture by Esther Pereen, University of Amsterdam
Thursday, March 26, 2026 6:00pm to 7:00pm
This is a keynote lecture for the 2025-2026 Obermann Symposium: "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research."
Esther Pereen, University of Amsterdam: "Reimagining the Rural from Idyll to Hinterland: Exhausting Rural Childhoods”
Across the social and cultural realms, the rural is often imagined through idyllic and pastoral genres that allow it to be conceived as a refuge from globalization. Pereen's European Research Council–funded project RURAL IMAGINATIONS, concentrating on...
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Upcoming Application Deadlines
Upcoming Application Deadlines
News
A Language in Motion: Jordan Gigout and Dance Notation
How do you write down a dance? To capture the body’s expressions, scholars have long turned to Kinetography Laban, a system for recording and analyzing movement that uses abstract symbols to define the direction of movement and the parts of the body that perform it, among other parameters. But what happens when that language of symbols is itself a historical artifact, reflecting the biases of its time? Can a system built on a specific vision of the body ever truly capture the full diversity of human movement, or does it inevitably shape what it records? This is the critical and creative realm of Jordan Gigout, a dancer and dance-notation scholar from Essen, Germany. His research explores how this historical language for movement can continue to evolve and inspire new ways of thinking about choreography today. This fall, we welcomed him as an Obermann International Fellow.
Time, Care, & the Moral Self with Shazia Rehman Khan
Often, an hourly employee, bound by the routines and schedules of a workplace, finds that she is constantly thinking about being somewhere she is needed more, perhaps at home, taking care of a child or elderly relative. While many researchers have studied how this internal conflict affects the worker's professional output, few have studied how it affects her self-image or moral self-concept. This is the province of Shazia Rehman Khan, Professor of Business and Social Ethics at Pakistan's Bahria University. Her scholarship asks whether women are the primary victims of organizational time structures (as they must often balance workplace schedules with demands for care and domestic work) and, more generally, how "clock time" shapes our moral selves. Khan recently spent a month at the University of Iowa as an Obermann International Fellow furthering her research on time justice and care ethics.
Inside Scholarly Publishing: A Conversation with Sara Jo Cohen
Ahead of her November residency, we asked Obermann Editor-in-Residence Sara Jo Cohen about what she hopes to accomplish during her time here, her advice on crafting strong proposals, the challenges and opportunities of open access publishing, and the exciting ways digital platforms are expanding scholarship. She also shared her own career journey from graduate study in English to university press publishing, reflected on the skills early-career scholars most need to cultivate today, and offered practical guidance for undergraduates seeking a foothold in the publishing world.
Rethinking Aging with Mercedes Bern-Klug
How often do you spend time with people significantly older than you? Not very often, if you’re like most Americans. “We live in an age-segregated society,” notes Mercedes Bern-Klug, professor, mentor, researcher, and practitioner at the UI School of Social Work. “Young people hang out with young people. Teenagers hang out with teenagers. There are few opportunities for the generations to mix, outside of places of worship.” Plus, she says, contemporary American society tends to view life after 30 as, well…boring. As a result, many young people miss out on intergenerational interaction and its many benefits: reduced loneliness, improved mental and physical health—and, particular to adolescents, identity formation, skill development, and academic improvement. They also tend to miss out on career opportunities working with the ever-growing senior demographic. (Americans 65 and older are projected to make up 23% of the U.S. population within the next 30 years.)
“Almost every health field is struggling to recruit enough students who want to work with older adults,” says Bern-Klug. To partly address this problem, the School of Social Work has created two general education courses aimed at freshmen—“Aging Matters: Intro to Gerontology” and “Mental Health Across the Lifespan”—with the hope of reaching more students.
A Wonderful Place to Write
The week after classes finished in the spring, I had the opportunity to participate in the Obermann Center’s End-of-Year Writing Retreat. The retreat offered faculty, staff, and students dedicated time to work on writing projects, which I hoped to spend editing my novel, a climate dystopia that centers on youth empowerment and the feeling of hopelessness that many of us experience as the climate changes despite our many efforts. Upon receiving an email of acceptance to the retreat, I was in class and could barely keep from grinning. However, underneath all that excitement, I felt a flicker of impostor syndrome. I didn’t know anyone in the retreat, and to make it more daunting, I was the only undergraduate student. So, even as I texted my friends and parents, overjoyed that I had been accepted, I was worried that I would be completely out of place.
Rasheedah Liman: Bridging Continents Through Eco-Theatre
This spring, we welcomed—and recently bid a regretful farewell to—Rasheedah Liman, director, playwright, and Professor of Theatre and Performing Arts at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria. Radiating enthusiasm from the moment she arrived, Rasheedah immersed herself in the UI theatre community and in discussions with faculty across the university. Liman is a scholar and practitioner of eco-theatre, a theatrical form that, in her words, "recognizes the potential of theatre to contribute to environmental consciousness, with the goal of harnessing the transformative power of the stage to engage audiences, evoke emotional responses, and promote environmental awareness."
