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dancers performing in public

Members of the 2025 Interdisciplinary Research Grant team Live Cinema Choreography for Public Spaces perform at FilmScene in the Park

Fostering collaborative scholarship & creative work

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 are intended to result in an important scholarly or creative work.

Each collaborator is awarded $3,000 in research funding for a 2-week residency.

We welcome IDRG applications from artists, researchers, and scholars in any discipline and on any topic. In addition, special funds are available to support one or two groups that are working specifically on projects focused on children's learning and development, child welfare, and/or maternal education. These funds are provided by the Laura Spelman-Rockefeller Grant. All aspects of the application process are the same.

Apply

Special funding is available for projects in the areas of children’s learning and development, child welfare, and maternal education through the Laura Spelman-Rockefeller Grant. Scholars working in these areas are especially encouraged to apply!

collage of images representing printmaking, books, DNA, and a city bus

Summer 2026 IDRGs

Read about Summer 2026 projects and co-directors.

Media Clown performance

Past IDRG Projects

Past projects and co-directors.

"We made enormous progress during this time, and came out of the residency with a clear plan for our work going forward. The focused time to work on the project was invaluable, and we are very grateful and excited for our next steps."

Johanna Kasimow (Theatre Arts, CLAS); co-director, The Thorn Bush Project

IDRGs in the News

Pressing Matters exhibition sign

Pressing Matters: Nichole Nidey and Laura Moser on stigma, art, and science

Monday, September 28, 2026
Reid Dempsey
“You have to dance,” says Professor Nichole Nidey (College of Public Health). “That’s the best way to get a good print.” Nidey is speaking to a young guest of the first-ever Pressing Matters exhibition, a girl of seven or eight. Laid on the floor of Close House, the downtown home of Public Space One, is a blank t-shirt and an inked linocut plate. Together, laughing, Nidey and her new young friend take turns to hop on the plate and dance their design into being.
IDRG group working

Variants of Uncertain Significance

Monday, August 17, 2026
Reid Dempsey
“I suppose what’s always speaking to me in the back of my mind is my mother,” says Benjamin Darbro. “She’s really the one who inspired this problem solving.” My question to University of Iowa professors John Manak, of the Department of Biology (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) and Darbro, of the Stead Family Department of Pediatrics (Carver College of Medicine), was about the nature of their work: What is your relationship to complexity?
Buckley and Bakopolous working on the script

Lights, Camera, Action!

Monday, August 26, 2024
Eleanor Ball
During their Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grant (IDRG) in summer 2024, screenwriter Dean Bakopoulos (Cinematic Arts) and drama scholar Jennifer Buckley (English & Theatre Arts) wrote the pilot for a new historical TV miniseries: Anton & Olga. The show, which Bakopoulos and Buckley plan to pitch to producers early next year, follows revolutionary playwright Anton Chekhov, actress Olga Knipper, and their colleagues at the newly-established Moscow Arts Theater (MAT) through personal, political, and artistic upheaval at the end of the nineteenth century.