Upcoming Events

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

"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...

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
Voxman Music Building

The Obermann Center's Wide Lens series aims to inspire and connect the University of Iowa community across the disciplines. For each Wide Lens event, researchers, scholars, and artists from across the university briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest PechaKucha–style. Then, we open the floor to questions and conviviality over hors d'oeuvres and drinks.

Presenters:

Stephanie DiPietro, Sociology & Criminology: Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War: Life Course Legacies of Conflict...

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...

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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...

News

Rasheedah Liman

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."
Gabriela Roman Fuentes

Narrating Pain, Shaping Poetics: Gabriela Román Fuentes Drafts Novel and Play during Obermann Fellowship

Eleanor Ball
This spring, we welcomed Obermann International Fellow Gabriela Román Fuentes, an award-winning Mexican author, to campus. Her research centers on the representation of illness and female bodies in contemporary Latin American literature. “I am interested in the way diseases are depicted and how authors address pain and intimacy in their writing, as well as how bodies and illnesses have shaped their work,” Fuentes explains. “I regard illness and female bodies not only as mere topics, but also as a structural device and/or a maker of their Poetics.” This research is the foundation for two of Fuentes’s new creative projects, a novel about a woman suffering from an autoimmune disease and a play about hysteria.
abstract human face with ear emphasized

Learn about Listening at Obermann’s May 8 Research Blitz

Eleanor Ball
This year’s Wide Lens event, Obermann’s annual celebration of research on campus, will center the theme of listening. The May 8 event at the Voxman Music Building will bring together researchers from science, social sciences, the humanities, and the arts to investigate what it means to listen deeply and thoughtfully. “Listening attentively is crucial to much of what we do as scholars, researchers, and practitioners,” says Luis Martin-Estudillo, Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. “It requires will and skill, and the six colleagues presenting on their work are fantastic at both, each one from a very different disciplinary platform.”
Eleanor Ball at UI Main Library

Eleanor Ball Lands Faculty Position at UNI!

Congratulations to Obermann Communications Assistant Eleanor Ball, who has secured two extraordinary library positions for the coming year! In May, Eleanor will graduate from the UI with a Master of Library & Information Science degree and will begin remote work as a Junior Fellow with the Library of Congress Center for Learning, Literacy, and Engagement. As part of the Center’s Literary Initiatives team, which develops literary programming and administers literary ambassadorships, Eleanor will help to increase the visibility and accessibility of programs like the National Book Festival, promote awareness of the Library’s resources and services, and share with the public a diverse range of established and new literary voices. Then, in August, she’ll begin a three-year term with the University of Northern Iowa as Assistant Professor of Instruction & Information Literacy and Liaison Librarian, where she’ll liaise with the library and academic departments across campus, as well as teach information literacy classes.
Cultivating Rurality logo

Rurality to be Focus of March 2026 Obermann Symposium

Eleanor Ball
Obermann Center for Advanced Studies
We’re pleased to announce the 2025-26 Obermann Symposium, “Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research,” co-directed by Daria Fisher Page, Brian R. Farrell, and Ryan T. Sakoda from the UI College of Law. “Cultivating Rurality” will take a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at the subject of rurality through the lenses of law, medicine, education, sustainability, business, social science, and the arts by connecting faculty members and others at the University of Iowa who are already engaged in rural research and teaching, as well as scholars, community leaders, and professionals who work with rural populations and in rural spaces.
Middle-aged man with glasses and flannel

From Kosovo to Iowa: Ercan Canhasi Advances AI and Research Strategy in Underserved Nations

Eleanor Ball
This spring, we welcomed Obermann International Fellow Dr. Ercan Canhasi, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Prizren in Kosovo. He specializes in machine learning, natural language processing, and text mining, and his research includes developing language resources for underserved languages like Albanian. “While at the University of Iowa, I worked on a new research project with Professor Cassie Barnhardt, titled ‘Mapping Universities’ Research Capacity and ROI [Return on Investment] in Low-Expenditure R&D Nations,’” he shares. “The project aims to analyze how universities in countries with limited research funding can optimize their research output and institutional effectiveness.”
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Recent Events

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2026–27) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Symposium Directorship (2026–27)

Wednesday, October 29, 2025 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...

Registration Deadline: Graduate Student Breakfast & Talk with Sara Jo Cohen, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Registration Deadline: Graduate Student Breakfast & Talk with Sara Jo Cohen, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Tuesday, October 21, 2025 5:00pm
111 Church Street

UI graduate students at all stages are invited to join Editor Cohen for breakfast and a talk focused on turning an article, thesis, or dissertation into a book. The session will take place on Tuesday, November 4, from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. at the Obermann Center library.

Register by Oct. 21, 5 p.m. Learn more and register at https://obermann.uiowa.edu/obermann-editor-residence.

Cohen is Editorial Director at University of Michigan Press, where she acquires titles in music, theater and performance...

Application Deadline: Editorial Consultations with Sara Jo Cohen, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Application Deadline: Editorial Consultations with Sara Jo Cohen, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Monday, October 13, 2025 5:00pm
111 Church Street

UI faculty, students, and staff are invited to apply for a 20- 30-minute editorial consultation with the Obermann Center's 2025 Editor-in-Residence, Sara Jo Cohen, at the Obermann Center library on Monday, Nov. 3, 2025.

Potential discussion topics could include finding an editor, pitching a book, writing a book proposal, how the publishing process works, etc. Applications are due Oct. 13 by 5 p.m.

Learn more and apply at https://obermann.uiowa.edu/obermann-editor-residence.

Cohen is Editorial...

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2026) promotional image

Application Deadline: Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (Summer 2026)

Wednesday, October 8, 2025 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...

5/2: How Polarity Yields Five Codes of Music - A Syzygy with S/Z. Presentation 1: From Polarity to Plurality promotional image

5/2: How Polarity Yields Five Codes of Music - A Syzygy with S/Z. Presentation 1: From Polarity to Plurality

Monday, October 6, 2025 7:30pm
Voxman Music Building
The first of seven presentations of an intergalactic music poetics. Drawing together ancient wisdom and modern science, this poetics aims at transmuting one’s experience of everything as music and living joyfully even as we work confidently toward an abundant future.
Application Deadline: Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Sara Jo Cohen, Obermann Editor-in-Residence promotional image

Application Deadline: Faculty Book Proposal Workshop with Sara Jo Cohen, Obermann Editor-in-Residence

Wednesday, October 1, 2025 5:00pm
111 Church Street

For this workshop, 4–5 UI faculty members will submit book proposal drafts for a collaborative feedback session on Nov. 5 led by Sara Jo Cohen, the Obermann Center's 2025 Editor-in-Residence. The session is designed to help authors write a compelling book proposal, with a focus on crafting a strong pitch, identifying target audiences, and outlining the project’s structure. The workshop’s goal is for participants to walk away with a strong and cohesive book proposal, increasing their chance of...