Upcoming Events

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival promotional image

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival

Friday, April 24 to Sunday, April 26, 2026 (all day)
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
The Iowa City International Film Festival is a student-run experimental film festival hosted in Iowa City.
Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival promotional image

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival

Saturday, April 25 to Sunday, April 26, 2026 (all day)
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
The Iowa City International Film Festival is a student-run experimental film festival hosted in Iowa City.
Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival promotional image

Iowa City International Documentary Film Festival

Sunday, April 26, 2026 (all day)
Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
The Iowa City International Film Festival is a student-run experimental film festival hosted in Iowa City.
Conflict and Resolution — An Obermann Wide Lens Event promotional image

Conflict and Resolution — An Obermann Wide Lens Event

Wednesday, May 6, 2026 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Iowa Memorial Union (IMU)

In a world shaped by tension, disagreement, and change, conflict surrounds us, from moments of personal friction to struggles within communities and across nations. It surfaces in our institutions, our relationships, and the stories we tell about ourselves and others. How do conflicts take shape and persist? How are they influenced by power, perspective, and history? Can conflict be generative? What forms might resolution take? How do we begin that process?

This Wide Lens event brings together...

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Upcoming Application Deadlines

Upcoming Application Deadlines

Application Deadline: Small Important Project Grants promotional image

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...

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann International Fellowships (Spring 2027)

Friday, September 18, 2026 11:59pm
111 Church Street

The UI Obermann Center for Advanced studies is accepting applications for Spring 2027 Obermann International Fellowships. This program offers dedicated space, time, and funding for interdisciplinary scholars to collaborate on innovative research at the University of Iowa. Up to eight international fellowships will be granted every academic year. Applicants must be active researchers at an accredited institution of higher learning outside of the United States or independent researchers/artists...

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Application Deadline: Book Ends, Obermann Book Completion Workshop

Wednesday, September 23, 2026 5:00pm
Virtual

Books Ends supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books.

Book Ends brings together a panel of senior scholars for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on a faculty member’s book manuscript. The award provides a $500 honorarium for two external...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2027)

Wednesday, October 7, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. IDRG groups work at the Obermann Center for two weeks, usually in July and/or August. Applicants propose work on a project with colleagues from across the University, across disciplines within their own department, or with colleagues from other parts of the country or the world. Projects...

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2027–28)

Wednesday, October 28, 2026 5:00pm
111 Church Street

Is there a burning topic in your discipline or a topic that cuts across disciplines that we should bring to campus? Is there a format for the conversation that can energize an intellectual community around that topic? That might be the perfect topic for an Obermann Symposium!

In addition to a compelling topic, we invite co-directors to propose national and international speakers who can offer richly diverse perspectives on the symposium theme. We also want to highlight the work of UI and local...

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...

News

Old, rural public library with wooden door

Training Librarians to Preserve Community Memory

Over the past two decades, say Micah Bateman and Lindsay Mattock, recipients of a 2021 Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant, library and information science (LIS) graduate programs have privileged information science, data science, and computer science—at several universities even merging with computer science departments—over human- and community-centered practices central to the mission of library and archival sciences. One such practice involves the management of community memory records—everything from genealogical documents to newspaper archives to oral histories. Bateman and Mattock note that at small and rural libraries, these records often go “unmanaged and underused, and reflect only the narratives of majority or dominant populations” because the librarians working with those collections have been largely neglected by LIS training programs that privilege “big data” paradigms.
HWW logo

Apply for the Summer '23 Humanities Without Walls Predoctoral Career Diversity Workshop

Launched in 2015 as an initiative of the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) consortium, this annual workshop welcomes 30 participants each summer from higher education institutions across the United States. HWW Summer Workshop Fellows work in a variety of academic disciplines. They are scholars and practitioners who bring experience in community building, museum curation, filmmaking, radio programming, social media, project management, research, writing, and teaching....
Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

A Project Postponed: Scholars Take Interdisciplinary Grant Project on the Road

When the pandemic postponed Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (Communication Studies and GWSS, University of Iowa) and Shui-yin Sharon Yam's (Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, University of Kentucky) Obermann residency for their Interdisciplinary Research Grant project last summer, they decided to postpone their work until they could meet in person. Though the Center remained closed to faculty this...
John Rapson sitting at the piano

John Rapson: Looking Back at a Generous Collaborator

In the summer of 2014, it wasn't uncommon to find two faculty members padding around the Obermann Center in bare feet as they dashed from their upstairs offices to the downstairs library to watch movies. While it appeared to be a scholarly form of summer camp, John Rapson (School of Music) and Paul Kalina (Theatre) were deep in research as they broke down how music and movement interacted in old...
Virtual Reality Screenshot

Using Virtual Reality to Train Math Teachers

Most children in the U.S. struggle to learn mathematics, with 50 to 75% of students scoring below proficient on achievement tests in grades 4 through 12. Children with disabilities such as autism tend to fare even worse. Clearly, math teachers must be equipped to educate students who require varying levels of support—but, for the most part, they aren’t. Logistical issues inherent in conventional...
Dominic Dongilli at his internship

Summer Interns at the Halfway Mark: A growing tomato, a gift from Brokaw, and nudity in the archives

It is around the halfway point of so many projects when the work is most difficult. The newness has worn off; the end is still out of reach, but close enough to give us an uneasy reminder of how much is yet to be completed. This is the experience of the ten UI graduate students who are at the midway point of their Humanities for the Public Good (HPG) internships. For eight weeks, they are working...

Recent Events

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop promotional image

Fall Application Deadline: Book Ends Book Completion Workshop

Thursday, September 19, 2024 5:00pm

Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books Ends—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.

Applications for upcoming Book Ends workshops are due Sept. 19, 2024 (5 p.m.).

Application Deadline: Mellon Sawyer Seminar promotional image

Application Deadline: Mellon Sawyer Seminar

Monday, September 16, 2024 5:00pm

The Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminars program was established in 1994 to provide support for comparative research on historical and contemporary topics of scholarly significance. The seminars, named in honor of the Foundation’s long-serving third president, John E. Sawyer, bring together faculty, foreign visitors, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from a variety of fields — mainly, but not exclusively, in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences — for intensive study of...

Ten Years Too Long: Making the Flint Water Crisis Public Archive promotional image

Ten Years Too Long: Making the Flint Water Crisis Public Archive

Wednesday, July 10, 2024 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Virtual

The Flint Water Crisis Public Archive aims to aid community leaders, researchers, and the general public in better understanding what happened during the Flint Water Crisis. Without our intervention, we risk losing access to documents released regarding the crisis, stripping us of the opportunity to learn about these important events and their ongoing implications for communities in Michigan and beyond. Panelists will include the project's founder, who will discuss the upcoming launch of the...

Dissertation Camp promotional image

Dissertation Camp

Friday, June 7, 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...

Dissertation Camp promotional image

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...

Dissertation Camp promotional image

Dissertation Camp

Wednesday, June 5, 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...