Events & Deadlines
The following events are either sponsored or co-sponsored by the Obermann Center or highlight work close to that of our mission.
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This issue:
Events & Deadlines
Working with a Literary Agent
Perspectives from Academic Podcasters
Watch: What Do We Mean By Research Now?
Imagining America's New Initiative
Supporting Local Nonprofits
Hyaeweol Choi
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Working with a Literary Agent
An Obermann GET IT DONE Workshop
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Increasingly, academic authors are seeking ways to publish books that will have appeal beyond their disciplinary audience. Whether it’s a matter of landing a book contract with a non-academic press or finding avenues toward broader readership, such as through magazines and podcasts, having a literary agent can be very helpful. In this November 15 GET IT DONE, we talk with two UI faculty members who have worked with literary agents. We’ll hear about why they chose to work with an agent, how having an agent has affected their writing decisions, what agents think about scholarly writing, and more. THIS EVENT IS FREE & OPEN TO ALL.
Meenakshi Gigi Durham is a Professor and CLAS Collegiate Scholar in Journalism & Mass Communication, with a joint appointment in GWSS; she also currently serves as the UI faculty ombudsperson. Her recent book is MeToo: The Impact of Rape Culture in the Media (Polity, 2021). For a past book, The Lolita Effect, she worked with the commercial publisher Outlook Press.
Carrie Schuettpelz, Associate Professor of Practice in the UI Public Policy Center's School of Planning and Public Affairs, is a former homelessness policy advisor in the Obama Administration. She has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently working on a book about tribal enrollment that intertwines personal narrative, interviews, and data collection. She is an enrolled member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.
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What Do We Mean by Research Now?—Perspectives from Academic Podcasters
in the U.S. and Canada
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With the explosion of podcasts across disciplines in the past decade, humanities researchers are finding that podcasts and podcasting can encourage new forms of collaboration, knowledge, and public engagement. But as with any new form of scholarship, podcasts pose challenges for evaluation and assessment, from peer review to tenure and promotion.
The November 12 installment of our What Do We Mean by Research Now? series will be a virtual roundtable about new approaches to scholarly podcasting, innovative proposals for peer-reviewed podcasts, and national programs offering support for academic podcast creators. Our speakers are Hannah McGregor (pictured above), an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of magazines as serial media; Deepthi Murali, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University who works on a number of digital history podcasts including Consolation Prize and Masala History; and John Plotz, the Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University, co-host of the podcasts Recall This Book and Novel Dialogue, and a founding member of the new Humanities Podcast Network.
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VIDEO:
What Do We Mean by Research Now? Perspectives from National Foundations & the Researchers
They Support
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At a moment when budgets are challenging and departments stretched thin, our speakers in the What Do We Mean by Research Now? series are a tonic. Speakers in our first two programs make clear that stunning work in the humanities, including here at the UI, can and does continue, sometimes inspired by the very challenges that surround us. Few offer a more compelling vision of the capacities of the arts and humanities than the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humane Metrics Initiative team. The project's P.I., Christopher Long, participated in our second conversation and shared this transformative initiative which “creates and supports values-enacted frameworks for understanding and evaluating all aspects of the scholarly life well-lived and for promoting the nurturing of these values in scholarly practice.” Times of scarcity and conflict are tough, but they’re also the moment when ethical and intellectual values position those of us in higher education to shift our focus solely from the means—that next article to write and class to teach—to the all-encompassing ends, our potential for intellectual leadership. You could not find a better way to spend an hour than to watch their conversation.
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It is our pleasure to work with community partners via multiple Obermann Center programs. In this season of giving, we'd like to highlight several that are doing vital work in our area. We'll feature more in December.
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Open Heartland serves recent immigrants to our community, particularly people from South and Central America, many of whom have been through trauma and who have very little. Donations sought: monetary contributions.
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UI Food Pantry serves students who are experiencing food insecurity, a large and growing problem for undergraduate and graduate students. Donations sought: food, hygiene and cleaning products, monetary contributions.
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LGBTQ Archives of Iowa was co-founded by an alumni of our programs, Aiden Bettine, who is building an impressive organization that goes above and beyond the work of most archives. Donations sought: books, historical/cultural material, volunteer time, monetary contributions.
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Imagining America Introduces New Initiative |
The UI is a member of Imagining America (IA), a national consortium that brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory "America" and world. As part of its new Mellon-funded Leading and Learning Initiative (LLI), it is launching an IA member-only Study Group. The main research aim of LLI and the Study Group is to provide dynamic, actionable tools to shift institutional culture in higher education to more fully support public and activist scholarship in the arts, design, and humanities. This initiative ultimately aims to radically redefine how we understand where and by whom knowledge is produced and to provide a grounded view and practical tools to advocate for institutional change. The first Study Group speaker/facilitator is Dr. Rowena M. Tomaneng, President of San José City College, who will speak at the November 10 session.
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Hyaeweol Choi: Deepening Awareness and Knowledge
of Korea
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Obermann Advisory Board member Hyaeweol Choi was featured in Iowa Now this week for her work creating an intellectual hub for Korean Studies. Choi, the C. Maxwell and Elizabeth M. Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies, came to Iowa in 2018 to promote Korean studies in general, but says there was a missing piece: “I realized that there are Korea-related faculty members here, but we are all scattered in different departments. There is no central or intellectual hub that could serve as a platform toward advancing Korean studies,” says Choi. “I thought we might need an institutional base, and that’s when I came up with the Korean Studies Research Network.”
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