News from Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

ISSUE #1 | SPRING 2021

Message from Our Director

From my Zoom room to yours—welcome to 2021. This year we'll be considering ways to engage our richest campus resources of intellect and imagination in the service of a more just campus and world. Many of our spring events focus on the hard work of listening, envisioning, dismantling, and re-inventing. Please look for invitations to upcoming focus groups to ponder how the Center can support research more inclusively and equitably. I'm asking myself—how has 2020 asked me to reassess my work as an educator, a scholar, and a center director? How can I bring my expertise to problems we face as a nation and a planet? I've heard from many of you asking similar questions, and I look forward to hearing your priorities and how—especially where expertise and the world's challenges meet—we can help put your purpose into practice.

IWP's Chris Merrill joins national conversation on the role of arts & humanities in responding to the election

Jan. 27, 4:30 pm | Add to calendar

How can artists and scholars help the nation contend with the peril in which we find ourselves—starting with our own campuses? IWP's Chris Merrill will represent the Obermann Center, joining artist-scholars from our sister research centers at the Universities of Colorado and North Carolina. Together they will reflect on ways the cultural and creative disciplines—critical race studies, history, literature, cross-cultural creative work—can help us to process the last four years and imagine paths through a pandemic, struggles against racial and economic inequities, and political division.

Invite a Guest to Class

Mini-grants available for Spring 2021

Are you teaching an undergraduate or graduate course that features work by a colleague outside the UI? Would you like to invite a practitioner or an expert from the public sector whose perspective would complement course readings? The Obermann Center will provide a $150 honorarium to support virtual course visits. We especially welcome applications that invite the voices of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian Pacific Islander and Desi American artists and scholars into class discussion. Applications are welcome from graduate teaching assistants as well as instructional faculty.

Read more & apply

COVID's Lessons:

End of Life & Grief

An Obermann Conversation

Feb 16, 7 pm | Add to calendar

The past year has made the end of life and grief a daily communal event, as we receive numbers from the headlines and news from friends and family. In the West, death and grief have often been private acts, but COVID-19, along with the twin pandemic of racism and its inherent grief, has altered how we tend to these universal aspects of human experience. We'll hear from a palliative care physician, a memoirist, a hospice nurse, and a scholar regarding lessons from this past year.

Humanities Without Walls Grant Strategy Workshops

The Obermann Center is one of 16 consortial partners in The Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls initiative. In this third and final iteration of the grant, UI faculty and their campus and community collaborators will be eligible to apply in November for a major project grant for 2022-23. The CFP will be published in March. To prepare, the Obermann Center is offering seed grants to support grant preparation. We strongly encourage interested faculty to prepare by attending four HWW Grant Strategy Workshops. Led by Bill Hart-Davidson, Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Michigan State University, workshops will be held on Fridays in February at 12 PM CST:

February 5: Charting Pathways to Intellectual Leadership
February 12: Creating an Idea that Others Can Invest In
February 19: Building a Collaborative Team
February 26: Building a Funding Strategy

See the next newsletter for details about seed grants and information sessions (Feb. 15 8:30-9:30 a.m. and Feb. 23 3:30-4:30 p.m.).

Sawyer Seminar: Applications

The University of Iowa is honored to be invited to nominate a team for a 2022-23 Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar. The award supports a postdoctoral fellow, two graduate fellowships, and a year of thematically linked activities. Letters of interest are due March 1, and full applications are due March 29. To learn more about the program and two upcoming information sessions, visit our website:

Learn more

Welcome, Spring Fellows!

Theresa Donofrio (Coe College, Communications) will work on a project, "U.S. Genocide Rhetorics and Museum Representation," examining representations of genocide and other forms of violence in U.S. Holocaust museums.
Eric Hirsch (Franklin & Marshall University, Earth & Environment) will work on his book project, Investing in Indigeneity, an ethnography of growth in the southern Peruvian Andes against the backdrop of droughts and diminished agricultural prospects.
Michael E. Moore (History) will work on his book, The Cadaver Trial of Pope Formosus: The End of the Carolingian World Order.
Carol Severino (Rhetoric) will develop her work on characterizing and assessing first and second language writing development and the writing pedagogies that foster it.
Obermann Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows Ashley Cheyemi McNeil and Laura Perry will also continue as valued members of the bi-weekly seminar.

News & Achievements

Sarah Bond, Paul Dilley, and Ryan Horne published the edited volume that came from their 2016 Obermann Seminar, "Linked Open Data for the Ancient Mediterranean."
Aiden Bettine (Graduate Fellow '18 and HPG '19) has joined the Department of Special Collections and University Archives as Community and Student Life Archivist, a newly created position in the Libraries’ Residency Librarian Program. The project Bettine directs, the LGBTQ Iowa Archives & Library, also has a new physical home at 120 N. Dubuque Street.
Nathan Platte (Fellow, 2018) received FillmScene's Visionary Advocate Award for cohosting and producing FilmCastPodScene.
Lauren Irwin (Graduate Fellow '21) published an article in Inside Higher Education.