Imagine a small boat on large, dark sea. Imagine families of refugees, with small children and smaller bundles of belongings. Imagine them braving storms and starvation and shipwreck. It sounds like something from yesterday’s news report, but this historical exodus took place between the 8th and 11th centuries CE, when Arab Muslims conquered the once-expansive Persian Zoroastrian empire. Faced with religious persecution, groups of Zoroastrians escaped in boats and landed on the shores of Gujarat in India. Pervin Saket’s project as an Obermann International Fellow focuses on this community, her community, in modern-day India. Zoroastrianism, the world’s oldest monotheistic religion, is now practiced by only a handful of people, and that too is threatened by extinction. Saket says, “In the version I learned on my grandmother’s lap, the Parsis (literally “people of Pars or Persia”) were taken to the local king when they washed up on the shores of Gujarat. Suspicious of the foreigners, he showed them a bowl of milk filled to the brim, to indicate his land was full. The Parsi leader responded by sprinkling a few grains of sugar on the milk. I suspect that the king had a fondness for good metaphors."

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.

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.

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.

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.