Ashley Cheyemi McNeil, who has served as the Humanities for the Public Good program's postdoc for the last two years, has accepted a 2021 Leading Edge Fellowship with the American Council of Learned Societies. Cheyemi McNeil was appointed to Full Spectrum Features (FSF) for the project "Hidden Histories Digital Humanities Training Program for K-12 Teachers." FSF is one of the Midwest’s leading film and media nonprofit organizations working to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion in the independent film industry.

Logistical issues inherent in conventional teacher-training and professional development programs contribute to the problem, say Seth King, Anne Estapa, and Tyler Bell—members of this summer’s Immersive Virtual Mathematics Education for Teachers interdisciplinary research grant. Teacher candidates are required to spend only a limited time student teaching (logging even fewer classroom hours during COVID-19)—and even when they are in the classroom, many situations relevant to teaching math do not reliably present themselves. In many cases, there aren’t enough opportunities for teachers to practice under the supervision of qualified personnel, particularly in rural areas.

The Obermann Center had the pleasure to support three collaborative productions of which John Rapson was a primary author. Crescendo (2014), Hot Tamale Louie (2017), and Esteban: Children of the Sun (2021) share similar intentions of investigating parts of contemporary culture through the lenses of music, theater, historic research, and improvisation. They, like their maker, uplift community and interdisciplinary collaboration. 

When the pandemic postponed Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz (Communication Studies and GWSS, University of Iowa) and Shui-yin Sharon Yam's (Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, University of Kentucky) Obermann residency for their Interdisciplinary Research Grant project last summer, they decided to postpone their work until they could meet in person. Though the Center remained closed to faculty this summer, the pair met in Indiana, halfway between their homes, and spent an intensive week together working on a book project. 

New Grammars for Reproductive Justice traces the struggle among healthcare providers and reproductive justice advocates to invent vocabularies that account for the intersecting systems of oppressions and histories faced by poor women, people of color, queer, trans and non-binary people. Fixmer-Oraiz and Yam wrote two chapters during their time together and laid the foundation for the rest of the project.

In collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls project led by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Obermann Center is offering Seed Grants to support the development of applications for the third Grand Research Challenge. For the next two years, faculty-led teams can apply for up to $150,000 for collaborative projects dedicated to “interdisciplinary, collaborative, research-based projects in the humanities and arts that build a clearly communicated commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution into their project design and proposal narratives, regardless of the research topic or theme they focus on.”