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Upcoming Events

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium

Thursday, March 26 to Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)

Iowa City Public Library

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

Stanley Museum of Art

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...

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research — 2025–26 Obermann Symposium

Friday, March 27, 2026 (all day)

Iowa City Public Library

"More than 'Not Urban': Serving Rural Communities as Places and as People" — keynote lecture by Andy Mink, Smithsonian Institute

Friday, March 27, 2026 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Iowa City Public Library

This is a keynote lecture for the 2025-2026 Obermann Symposium: "Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research."

Andy Mink, Smithsonian Institute: "More than 'Not Urban': Serving Rural Communities as Places and as People"

What are synonyms for rural? Country and small town? Rustic or backcountry? Pastoral or hick? Rural communities are an important part of American life and history, yet they are frequently seen in a deficit model defined by what they are not instead of what they...

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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants

Friday, May 8, 2026 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 ten 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

Graduate students: Note that the Graduate College offers Small Grants for the...

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Allies in Healing: Katy Schroeder and the Human-Animal Interactions for Wellbeing Collaborative

College of Education

The first time Katy Schroeder truly understood the positive impact of connecting people with animals in therapy, she wasn’t sitting in a lab or behind a desk. She was standing beside a horse. “I realized how passionate I was about integrating human-horse interactions into mental health treatment,” she recalls. “It was such a powerful realization.” At the time, Schroeder was living in Bend, Oregon, and pursuing her master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. The idea of incorporating animals into therapy wasn’t new — but it also wasn’t widely studied or regulated. Still, something about it clicked. It lit a path she hadn’t seen before. “I caught the research bug,” she says. Encouraged by a mentor, Schroeder stayed on to earn her doctorate at Oregon State University, where she discovered her second calling: teaching. “That’s really when everything started to come together for me.” That clarity eventually led her to the University of Iowa, where she now serves as an associate professor in the College of Education's Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program in the Department of Counselor Education. There, she’s quietly reshaping how students — and the field—understand the relationship between humans and animals in mental health care.

From the Hank Lab to the Streets of Romania: A Conversation with Patricia Marga

Maria Torres Melgares

In a nation confronting one of the highest rates of traffic accidents in Europe, the simple act of crossing the street is a critical public health challenge. This issue is the driving force behind the work of Patricia Marga, a PhD student in public health from Romania. She's on a mission to tackle this crisis by exploring how virtual reality can be harnessed to study and improve pedestrian safety for the most vulnerable: elderly citizens crossing busy city streets and children navigating crowded school zones. Her pursuit of research methods on injury prevention brought her to the University of Iowa this fall as an Obermann International Fellow.

A Language in Motion: Jordan Gigout and Dance Notation

Maria Torres Melgares

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

Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

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

Maria Torres Melgares

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.

Bern-Klug wearing American Association of Social Work and Social Welfare medal

Rethinking Aging with Mercedes Bern-Klug

Jenna Hammerich

Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

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.

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Recent Events

Dissertation Camp

Thursday, June 6, 2024 9:00am to 1:00pm

Virtual

The 2024 dissertation writing camp runs from Tuesday, May 28 to Friday, June 7. Spaces are limited; priority will be given to doctoral students who are post-proposal, have mostly completed data collection, and are focused on writing. We meet via Zoom from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. (Mon-Fri). Each day begins with a short group discussion and ends with a 30-minute presentation focused on dissertation writing, but most of the time is devoted to writing. Participants set daily and weekly writing goals and...

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