Events & Deadlines
The following events are either sponsored or co-sponsored by the Obermann Center or highlight work close to that of our mission.
Sept. 1 - DEADLINE - MLA Public Humanities Incubator A competitively selected opportu nity for current graduate students with an interest in public humanities scholarship.
Sept. 2 - Book launch for E Cram's Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West
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This issue:
Events & Deadlines
Racial Reckoning through Comics: A Mellon Sawyer Seminar
2022–23 Book Ends Manuscript Completion Awards
Join Our New Writing Group
Humanities for the Public Good Column
Debuts
Fall Obermann Conversations Announced
Achievements & Recognition
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Have you explored PIVOT, the easy-to-use, searchable database that provides information on funding opportunities from federal, non-federal, foundation, corporate, and other private sponsors across all disciplines? Pivot also identifies researcher expertise within or outside the University to help connect with potential collaborators. We'll be offering a session later this year on how arts and humanities researchers can most effectively use Pivot.
We will also feature a handful of opportunities from Pivot in our newsletters that we think might be of interest to Obermann scholars. For instance:
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2022–23 Mellon Sawyer Seminar
Racial Reckoning through Comics
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This academic year, the Obermann Center hosts the third Mellon Sawyer Seminar awarded to the UI. “Racial Reckoning through Comics” features a series of events designed to address racial and ethnic representation in global popular culture as both a historical legacy and an ongoing concern. In addition to presentations by prominent visiting creators and scholars, a film series, workshops, podcasts, and other public events that are open to all, local participants can join a year-long intensive seminar led by the Sawyer Seminar's co-directors Corey Creekmur (Cinematic Arts, English, and GWSS), Ana Merino (Spanish & Portuguese), and Rachel Williams (University of North Carolina School of the Arts).
The first public presentations are on September 9 and 10 and feature:
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Frederick Luis Aldama (Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin) - "Geometrizing Ethnoracial Formation Narratives in BIPOC Teen Comics"
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Stacey Robinson (Associate Professor, Graphic Design, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) - "Calculating the Sensory Aesthetics of Black Liberation"
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Bishakh Som, (Bengali-American transgender author, artist, illustrator) - Artist's talk
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Rebecca Wanzo, (Professor and Chair, Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies, Washington University) - "Redrawing the Western Canon: Race, Identification, and 'High' Art in Comics"
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Manuscript Completion Workshops
Opportunity for Associate and Assistant Professors
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Co-sponsored by the Obermann Center and the Office of the Vice President for Research, Books Ends—an Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop—supports University of Iowa faculty from disciplines in which publishing a monograph is required for tenure and promotion. The award is designed to assist associate and assistant professors in turning promising manuscripts into important, field-changing, published books. Recent awardees include E Cram, Violent Inheritance (University of California Press) and Chris Goetz, The Counterfeit Coin (Rutgers University Press).
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Writing Group at Obermann
Gain support & accountability
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If you are seeking camaraderie for your writing life, consider joining our new Obermann-sponsored writing group. PhD student Kaity Lindgren-Hansen (Religious Studies) is facilitating a group that meets on Wednesday mornings from 10–11:30 a.m., beginning August 31. The group will focus on accountability and structured time to write in community. They will begin and end each session with time to set goals for the coming week and to celebrate each other’s writing successes. In order to prioritize writing during the meeting, they will use the pomodoro technique (or other strategies folks would like to try!). We have space for up to twelve people willing to commit to weekly meetings over the course of the semester. Reach out to kaitlyn-lindgren@uiowa.edu.
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Fall Lineup of Obermann Conversations |
We're delighted to return for our tenth season of Obermann Conversations in partnership with the Iowa City Public Library! This series puts UI scholars, artists, students, and staff in conversation with members of the community around issues of mutual passion. We work to spotlight issues that resonate with and affect a wide audience.
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Sep. 21 - The Impact of Schools on Mental Health featuring Allison Bruhn, Executive Director of the Iowa Center for School Mental Health; Lindsey Schluckebier, Curriculum Coordinator: K-12 Counseling & Health, ICCSD; Shannon Lea Watkins (Community & Behavioral Health), and Maithreyi Gopalan (Education & Public Policy, Penn State University).
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Oct. 12 - Revising Injustice: Emphatically Anti-Racist Comics featuring Corey Creekmur and Ana Merino, co-directors of the Racial Reckoning through Comics Mellon Sawyer Seminar, and invited artists.
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Nov. 16 - Child Care: A Dearth of Availability, A Depth of Need featuring Jennifer Banta of the Iowa City Area Business Partnership and Asha Bhandary (Philosophy).
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Humanities for the Public Good
Look to this space for ongoing updates!
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In recent years, the Obermann Center has hosted Humanities for the Public Good (HPG), a project funded by the Mellon Foundation. HPG is an integrative, collaborative, practice-based graduate Certificate and Master’s degree currently in development. The project is led by Obermann Center director Teresa Mangum with energetic support from Christine Getz, CLAS Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Outreach and Engagement, and the Graduate College, along with faculty, staff, and graduate students from across campus.
HPG responds to several needs:
1) HPG helps graduate students combine the arts, history, languages, literature, philosophy, religion, and adjacent disciplines with experiential, cross-disciplinary, cross-sectoral learning experiences—for example, through humanities labs and internships. 2) HPG prepares students to center equity, inclusion, and social justice in any and every career or workspace. 3) HPG supports CLAS, the Graduate College, and interested departments in designing creative curricular strategies to advance emerging research areas and formats, innovative applications of humanities methods and mindsets, and varied career outcomes for humanities graduate students.
Thanks to the incredible commitment of the teams that have developed plans for HPG, we have gathered a rich collection of materials, courses, conversations, and proposals. As we launch into the approval process, first for the certificate (this year), we’ll be sharing our discoveries over the coming months here in the Obermann Center's bi-weekly newsletter. We look forward to your responses!
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Achievements & Recognition
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Micah Bateman and Lindsay Mattock have garnered a major grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to continue and expand the work of their IDRG project about serving rural libraries.
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Aiden Bettine (Graduate Institute and HPG) has accepted a new job at the University of Minnesota as curator of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies.
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Leslie Schwalm (Fellow-in-Residence) was featured in Telling Our Own Story, a film series on Iowa PBS.
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