During two years of planning, symposium co-directors Jen Buckley (English) and Joyce Tsai (Stanley Museum of Art and the School of Art & Art History) have gathered an impressive array of 14 speakers who will help our community to think about the role of cultural institutions at a time when our own campus museum is being rebuilt.

We work hard to make the Obermann Center a welcoming place for scholars, artists, and community partners. We provide space for vital reflection on current issues via our Obermann Conversations series and ignite new connections through our Working Groups. Each year, we work tirelessly with faculty co-directors to produce a groundbreaking symposium that brings renowned experts to campus--as will happen this week, when museum leaders gather for our humanities symposium, What Can Museums Become?

In recent years, we've also been a central player in securing and supporting grants that further the work of the humanities at the University of Iowa.The Mellon Sawyer Seminar Imagining Latinidades is continuing and expanding the work that the earlier Obermann-sponsored Latinos in the Midwest project began. The Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good project is working across colleges to create a new graduate program that recognizes current trends in higher education and seeks to address some of society's most pressing problems. For the last seven years, we have been a partner in the Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls consortium of 15 Midwestern universities.

Throughout the day on March 25, we will be sharing micro-stories of Obermann's impact. Although external grants energize special projects, the gifts of our donors are crucial to the Obermann Center's ongoing success. Thank you for considering a gift to the Center during this drive. Your contribution will support the research mission of the UI and the Obermann Center and help us to share the brilliant work of UI faculty and graduate students with larger audiences.

"Corruption is a very big area of study now," says William Reisinger, UI Professor of Political Science. "Every area of the social sciences is looking at it." The wave of work can be traced back to the 1990s, when international agencies that were focused on economic development in poorer countries realized that much of their funding was being lost to corruption. 

As a Spring 2020 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, Reisinger is working on a book that weaves analyses and insights from other social science disciplines into a project that uses data from surveys completed in 2015 and 2018 in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and China. His goal is to improve understanding of how corruption in a society affects the public's support for its political leaders and institutions. He and his co-author, Marina Zaloznaya (Sociology), are especially interested in the effects of petty corruption, the day-to-day insistence on small amounts of money and favors to grease the wheels of bureaucracy.

UI history PhD alumni Sylvea Hollis, Eric Zimmer, and Karen Christianson, pictured left to right, approach history as a communal endeavor. Their work in governmental, non-profit, and private sectors reflects ideals of community engagement, social justice, and the infusion of humanities values and methods into civic culture--all of which is central to the emerging vision of the Humanities for the Public Good graduate degree.