December 2017
Events

News & Achievements
  • Kat Litchfield (Center for Human Rights and former Obermann Graduate Fellow) was featured in a Gazette article about a new education program she helped to create at the Iowa Medical & Classification Center.
Consider a Gift to the Obermann Center This Holiday Season
 
Your donation to the Obermann Center registers a commitment to interdisciplinary research. It underscores your belief that UI researchers, scholars, and artists benefit from cross-disciplinary conversations and collaborations. It celebrates experiments with the forms discoveries can take - from publicly engaged work to digital projects to performance. It offers gratitude for the time and space you received to complete a project and pays those forward for your colleagues. It is a reminder that our community is enriched by a space dedicated to intellectual process as well as products.
2018 Graduate Institute Fellows Selected
Iowa Youth Writing Project Is Public Partner for this Year's Institute

This year's Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy Fellows will spend the week of January 8 learning how to weave public engagement into their research and teaching. A highlight of the week is always a site visit with a public partner, culminating with a project proposal to that partner. This year, we are excited to partner with the Iowa Youth Writing Projecta nonprofit collective founded by University of Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates that connects Iowa City's unique literary heritage with Iowa's larger community by empowering, inspiring, and educating Iowa's youth through language arts and creative thinking. 

The Institute is co-directed by Tricia Zebrowski (Communication Sciences & Disorders) and Jacki Rand (History), with assistance from returning fellow Christopher Taylor (School of Library & Information Science). Our new fellows include doctoral and master's candidates in programs ranging from Community and Behavioral Health and Dance to Social Work and English. 

Pop-Up Conversation + Spring Slate
#Hashtag Activism Topic of Dec. 4 Obermann Conversation

Activists of all kinds now turn to social media to spread ideas and enliven dialogue. We'll talk with scholars in Journalism, Sociology, and Communication Studies, as well as a local high schooler who started a hashtag campaign about the power of this tool - in addition to its limitations and drawbacks - on Monday, December 4, from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. at the Iowa City Public Library.

Please jot down the following dates for our Spring 2018 Obermann Conversations, all of which are 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. at the Iowa City Public Library:
  • Unraveling and Mending: Art as Political Witness, Feb. 6, with Lisa Schlesinger (Theatre Arts) and Amir ElSaffar (jazz musician and Hancher guest artist)
  • So Long, Cursive! March 6, with Cheryl Jacobsen (calligrapher), Lisa Roberts (poet and Iowa Youth Writing Project), and Shawn Datchuk (Teaching & Learning)
  • Global Citizenship, April 19, with Jason Harshman (Teaching & Learning), Alisa Meggitt (North Central Jr. High), and Caleb Elfenbein (History and Religious Studies, Grinnell College).
Interview with Rachel Williams
Hear about Williams's project
and see her in action!
Rachel Williams in the Archives 
UI Law Library Provided Archival Clues to Detroit Riot 

Rachel Williams (GWSS and Art & Art History) is writing and illustrating a graphic history of the Detroit riots of 1943, one of the largest race riots in U.S. history. She has relied on evidence, including newspaper articles and court hearings, from multiple archives. A set of NAACP affidavits in the UI's Law Library provided a key source of inspiration for the work.   Williams will be one of many speakers at our Obermann Humanities Symposium and Provost's Global Forum, March 1-3, 2018, Against Amnesia: Archives, Evidence, & Social Justice .

A Mayor's Perspective
Iowa City's Mayor Jim Throgmorton to Host Panel Discussion

Friday, Dec 1, 12:00-1:30 at FilmScene 
"What Four Mayors Have Learned over the Past Year" will bring together Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett, Waterloo Mayor Quintin Hart, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, and Iowa City Mayor Jim Throgmorton to discuss major challenges and opportunities in small- to medium-sized cities. Obermann Director Teresa Mangum (GWSS and English) will moderate the discussion and Q&A. All are welcome.   
Be the Talk of the Town with an Effective OpEd
Get It Done! Series Turns Attention to This Free, Communal Resource

Two veterans of the OpEd Project workshop, Teresa Mangum (GWSS and English) and Jessica Welburn (Sociology and African American Studies), will share advice on writing and publishing effective op-eds on Wednesday, January 31, from 12:00-1:00.

This series will be held in the Obermann Center library and will not be recorded. No reservations are needed. BYO lunch.

Naomi Greyser's New Book Explores Affective Geographies

POROI Co-Director and Fall Fellow Naomi Greyser has published her book On Sympathetic Grounds:  Race, Gender, & Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America (Oxford University Press).

With its filigreed, formidable representations of tears and suffering, sentimentalism has remained a divisive genre and category of analysis. Greyser's book talk, this Friday, December 1, at 4:00 p.m. in the Main Library Gallery, puts forward a new interpretation of the sentimental by mapping its grounds in North America. During sweeping transformations of territory, land stewardship, personhood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century, sentimentalists evoked sympathy to express a desire for a place  that was both territorial and emotional - what Greyser calls an "affective geography."
Coming Up...
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   From Our Archives (2014)


Andrea Charise was an Obermann Post-Doctoral Fellow in 2013-14. She helped to organize an Obermann Working Symposium on the health humanities and is now doing buzz-worthy work at the University of Toronto.

"Charise's doctoral dissertation allowed her to marry her two passions through an analysis of representations of older age in nineteenth-century British novels. Her dissertation, 'Time's feeble children': Old Age and the Nineteenth-Century Longevity Narratives, 1793-1901, focuses on how literary engagements with older age - the language, metaphors, portrayals - can be placed in conversation with similar strategies from medical discourses. Reading novels by George Eliot, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley next to nineteenth-century British medical textbooks, political tracts, and economic essays, she sought to better understand the evolving definitions and concerns about older people.

'Essentially, you find the beginning of geriatrics as a field during this era,' she says. Similar strategies were appearing in many discourses for how to approach the aging body as an object of study. 'The aging body presented a real opportunity for what we would now call an "interdisciplinary" conceptualization of human life.'"