Letter from Our Director
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2022–23 Working Group Highlights
Over 200 faculty, staff, students, and sometimes community partners participated in our 29 groups this year. Many of these cross-disciplinary groups enrich members’ research-in-progress, and their readings keep members in touch with cutting-edge developments in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and health and natural sciences. Other groups form to weave cross-disciplinary research into co-designed courses, articles, grants, and speaker series. Here, we give you a tiny taste of some of the outcomes in 2022-23:
Algorithms and Culture Research
- Published “Trust in online search results during uncertain times” in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media
Black Visual Culture
- Co-planned a three-week film series at FilmScene, “Out of the Archive: Black Women Behind the Lens”
Facilitating Difficult Dialogues
- Received the 2023 University of Iowa Diane L. Finnerty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Legacy Award
Food Studies
- In sharing their research, were inspired to design several new classes, including a General Education course on Global Food Migrations
Performance Studies
- Organized a workshop in the new Stanley Museum Visual Classroom to explore the relationships among performance, film, texts, digital arts, and platforms
Reproductive Justice
- Hosted a meeting of local and regional stakeholders to discuss the current state of reproductive health in Iowa to share research and foster partnerships with public partners
Translation across the Humanities
- Supported Working Group director Aron Aji in securing a $1M US-DOE grant to establish a National Resource Center for Translation and Global Literacy at the UI
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"The Decolonizing Acting in the Classroom Obermann Working Group has been a source of support as I navigate implementing changes to my class curricula. Reporting to the group and springboarding ideas off of them is one of the ways I hold myself accountable as I redesign my classes for diversity, equity, and inclusion.” —Mary Mayo, Theatre Arts
"As a new hire last year, The Obermann Working Group was and remains a space that is nourishing for me navigating teaching in a new community/institution. It provides structure (texts and time together) for engaging deeply with colleagues about inclusive, anti-racist pedagogy and sharing questions, challenges, resources, and discoveries that are emerging in real time in our classrooms.” —Johanna Kasimow
"I am very grateful that the Chinese Humanities and Arts Working Group connects teachers and scholars at multiple institutions. The pandemic has engendered isolation among scholars, and we are lucky to have this group to bring us together, to combat isolation, and to help us develop our scholarship and share research." —Dixuan Yujing Chen, Religious Studies, Grinnell College
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Featured Working Group Event:
The Performance Studies Working Group, the Department of Dance, and Public Space One welcomed artist Kayla Hamilton for a week of movement and dialogue in March 2023. Kayla met with UI faculty and students for XYZ and gave a public artist talk attended by XYZ. Kayla is a performance maker, dancer, educator, cultural consultant, and the artistic director of K. Hamilton Projects. A 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, her past performance work has been presented at the Whitney Museum, Gibney, Performance Space New York, New York Live Arts, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. Kayla has developed "Crip Movement Lab"—a pedagogical framework centering cross-Disability accessible movement practices that are open to everybody.
ASK JEN BUCKLEY OR STEPHANIE MIRACLE FOR MORE INFO.
Our Sawyer Seminar drew from both critical perspectives and creative work in the arts, humanities, and social sciences to address how race and ethnicity have been represented historically. Through yearlong conversation and four exciting public symposia, we considered how comics reflect and shape understanding of race and ethnicity in specific times and places. We welcomed critical and creative reflections on troubling as well as affirming images, and on depictions by and of “others” as well as examples of personal or collective self-representation. Addressing a public audience in a community steeped in the arts and committed to social justice, we posed hard but necessary questions and welcomed diverse and thoughtful responses.
ADD SUMMARY FROM ESTHER, INCLUDING ATTENDANCE #S
- Corey Creekmur, Co-Director (Cinematic Arts; English; and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies)
- Ana Merino, Co-Director (Spanish & Portuguese)
- Rachel Williams, Co-Director (Division of Liberal Arts, University of North Carolina School of the Arts)
- Esther Claudio, Postdoctoral Scholar
- Nicole Amato, Graduate Research Assistant (Literacy, Language, and Culture)
- Matt Griffin, Graduate Research Assistant (Communication Studies)
Wide Lens
For the last two years, many of us have deeply missed the good company of our colleagues. This new series—a joint initiative of the UI College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Stanley Museum of Art—aims to re-inspire and reconnect us. For each gathering in the Wide Lens series, researchers, scholars, and artists from across the university briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest (pecha kucha–style). Then, we open the floor to questions and conviviality over hors d'oeuvres and drinks at the Stanley Museum of Art. The series is free and open to all.
WATER through a Wide Lens
This event treated attendees to a flood of ideas about water.
Presenters:
- Jean-François Charles, Music, CLAS — Sounding Water
- Rob Rouphail, History, CLAS — The Black Water of the Indian Ocean
- Samantha Zuhlke, Planning and Public Affairs, Graduate College — Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and Public Distrust
- Terry Conrad, Art and Art History, CLAS — Ocean as Printshop
- Michelle Scherer, Civil & Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering — Get the Lead Out of Iowans’ Drinking Water!
Attendees: NUMBER
MEMORY through a Wide Lens
What is forgotten? What is remembered? How reliable are our recollections? What ethical questions could or should guide how we engage with others’ memories?
Presenters:
- Isabel Muzzio, Psychological and Brain Sciences, CLAS; and Neuroscience Institute, Carver College of Medicine — Remembering Our Past: Emotions Matter
- Marie Kruger, English and GWSS, CLAS — Curating Women's Memories of Apartheid
- Cory Gundlach, Stanley Museum of Art — Making Time: A Memory Board from the Congo in Iowa
- Amber Brian, Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS — Memories of the Conquest of Mexico
- Paula Amad, Cinematic Arts, CLAS — The Cloud in the Archive
- Mercedes Bern-Klug, Social Work, CLAS — When Memory Fades: Tap into Imagination
Attendees: NUMBER
Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop
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 UI faculty members with significant research responsibilities turn promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books. Book Ends brings two senior scholars to campus for a candid, constructive three-hour workshop on the faculty member’s book manuscript.
This year, we supported workshops for two faculty members:
Eric Vázquez
Book project: States of Defeat: U.S. Imaginaries about Revolutionary Central America
"After over a century of political uprisings, U.S. intellectuals looked upon the twenty-first century and determined that revolutionary struggle—previously thought to be the motor of human history—had somehow run aground. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States' pivot towards boundless intervention and imperialist occupation in the global war on terror, ideologies of social liberation and decolonization seemed like the remnants of a bygone era. My book project reframes the consensus about this geopolitical transition through an analysis of intellectual works about the Cold War's final paroxysm: wars of revolution and counterrevolution in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala during the 1980s and 90s."
Quote coming (LC)
Paula Amad
Book project: Cin-aereality: Aviation, Cinema, and Modernity
"In a little-known essay from 1931 titled “Speaking of Cinema” (“A Propos du cinéma”), the painter Fernand Léger claimed that “[t]he cinema and aviation go arm in arm through life. They were born on the same day.” [...] My book asks: What can we learn from Léger’s (and others’) couplings of cinema and aviation that adds to our understanding of the most fraught mode of modern perception -- aerial vision -- both at the point of its historical emergence and its controversial intensification a century later in the era of drone warfare?"
Quote coming (LC)
Outcomes
Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and the Making of the North American West
Violent Inheritance (University of California Press, May 2022) deepens the analysis of settler colonialism's endurance in the North American West and how infrastructures that ground sexual modernity are both reproduced and challenged by publics who have inherited them. E Cram redefines sexual modernity through extractivism, wherein sexuality functions to extract value from life including land, air, minerals, and bodies. Analyzing struggles over memory cultures through the region's land use controversies at the turn of and well into the twentieth century, Cram unpacks the consequences of western settlement and the energy regimes that fueled it.
Cram's book also won the Rhetoric Society of America's 2023 Book Award!
The Counterfeit Coin: Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment
The Counterfeit Coin (Rutgers University Press, May 2023) argues that games and related entertainment media have become almost inseparable from fantasy. In turn, these media are making fantasy itself visible in new ways. Though apparently asocial and egocentric—an internal mental image expressing the fulfillment of some wish—fantasy has become a key term in social contestations of the emerging medium. At issue is whose fantasies are catered to, who feels powerful and gets their way, and who is left out.
Fellows-in-Residence
Brady G'Sell
During her residency, G'Sell undertook grant-funded research, applied for additional funding, presented at a conference, and traveled to South Africa to begin a research project comparing the experiences of migration and resettlement for African women migrants coming to South Africa and to Iowa as a lens for understanding the workings of anti-black racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and gender discrimination and responses to them in these two very different contexts. For the local half of her project, she began to work with Osamamen Oba Eduviere, a graduate student in Religious Studies whose research focuses on Nigerian migrant women in the U.S. Together they wrote and submitted a proposal to the Humanities Without Walls Grand Research Challenge initiative.
G'Sell also furthered work on her book Reworking Citizenship: Kinship, Race, and Political Belonging in South Africa, which focuses on the livelihood strategies that impoverished South African women of color employ to support their children as a lens to analyze the interrelationship between seemingly disconnected domains: citizenship, kinship, and economy.
Carolyn Colvin
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Sylvia Mikucki-Enyart
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Obermann Advisory Board, 2022–23
- Jennifer Buckley, English, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- David Cwiertny, Civil & Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering
- Mary Beth Easley, Theatre Arts, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Claire Fox, English and Spanish & Portuguese, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Amanda Haertling Thein, Graduate College and College of Education
- Brandi Janssen, Occupational & Environmental Health, College of Public Health
- Lauren Lessing, UI Stanley Museum of Art
- Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Office of the Vice President for Research; Religious Studies and Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (ex-officio)
- Maurine Neiman, Biology, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Roland Racevskis, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Administration (ex-officio)
- Victor Ray, Sociology & Criminology and African American Studies, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Stephen Warren, History and American Studies, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Donors
List 2022-23 donors?
Other friends and supporters (similar to https://ocasannualreport2021.com/gratitude/)?
Contents:
Still need to do:
Frequencias: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora
Co-directors:
- Christopher Harris, Cinematic Arts
- Cristiane Lira, Romance Languages, University of Georgia
- Janafna Oliveira, Federal lnstituto of Rio de Janeiro
Humanities for the Public Good: An Integrative, Collaborative, Practice-Based Graduate Certificate and Master's Degree
- Teresa Mangum, P.I., Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies and English
- List anyone else? Did we have a grad assistant in fall? Postdoc?
Spelman Rockefeller-Funded Scholars and Projects
Interdisciplinary Research Grants:
Breastfeeding for Mothers with Multiple Sclerosis
- Christine Gill, Neurology
- Pamela Mulder, Nursing
- Solange Saxby, Internal Medicine
Ethnography of Nutrition Procurement Strategies of Recently Hospitalized Adults in Rural Iowa Counties
- Carly Nichols, Geographical & Sustainability Sciences
- Hilary Mosher, Internal Medicine
Flame Sonification and Flame-Based Audio Effect Processing
- Jean-Frani;:ois Charles, School of Music
- Albert Ratner, Mechanical Engineering
- Frederick Skiff, Physics & Astronomy
Healthy Aging across the Life Course: Engaging Multigenerational Families Living with Chronic Conditions
- Ebonee Johnson, College of Public Health
- Duhita Mahatmya, College of Education
- Kimberly Dukes, Internal Medicine
Just Crushing: A Demolition Derby
- Allison Rowe, Teaching & Learning
- Maia Sheppard, Teaching & Learning
- Nancy Nowacek, Stevens Institute of Technology
Ruinous Gods: Suites for Sleeping Children - An Opera
- Lisa Schlesinger, Theatre Arts
- Layale Chaker, Independent composer
MELLON HUMANITIES WITHOUT WALLS: CONSORTIUM PARTNER AND SUB-AWARD
- Teresa Mangum, P.I., Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies and English
List 2022-23 Outcomes
Looking ahead to next year...(note what initiatives are in the works)
JH: drop in videos, photos wherever I can, plus links to articles we and others wrote....
a list of major donors, advocates, partners, or sponsors
Ad Hoc/Misc stuff:
2 Obermann Conversations in fall:
9/21: The Impact of Schools on Mental Health: An Obermann Conversation
11/16: A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament
Ad hoc:
Seeding Excellence?
Tara Bynum?
Summer Writing Retreat
Shakespeare?
New Faculty Coffees?
Co-sponsorships:
List all?