Join us and please invite your students—especially those with interests in African American Studies, art, archives, comics, creative writing, ethnicity, history, literature, politics, sociology, critical race theory, and social justice—to the next Mellon Sawyer Seminar event on November 4 and 5!
The second public symposium in our Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Racial Reckoning through Comics, is coming up fast and focuses on Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics. We’ll be joined by three fascinating scholar-artists. Their works ask how comics have neglected and addressed racialized histories and futures. Friday opens with Lara Saguisag, Professor and Chair in Children’s Literature at New York University, founder of the Children’s Literature Association’s social justice project Climate Lit, author of the award-winning book Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics, and author of children’s books. She’ll discuss "The Filipino Wave: Comics and Racial Capitalism.”
On Saturday, we’ll hear from Julian Chambliss, Professor and curator at Michigan State University, home to one of the world’s largest comics archives. He explores Afro-Futurism and comics in a recent exhibition, Beyond the Black Panther: Vision of Afrofuturism in American Comics, and in his many digital humanities and print projects, including the co-edited collection Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domain. He’ll be “Rethinking the Critical Afrofuturist Framework: Comics, Futurity, and Black Counterpublics.”
The event will be at the Iowa City Public Library and will also be livestreamed. On Friday afternoon, Special Collections in the University of Iowa Main Library will host a guided tour of rare comics artifacts begging for further research as the seminar considers the archive as witness to a troubling, often overlooked past, as well as an invitation to historical revision and ongoing reckoning.
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Meet Willie Zheng, Our Undergraduate Communications Assistant!
This year, we're thrilled to be working with undergraduate communications assistant Willie Zheng. A pharmacy major, Willie is a freshman from Marion, Iowa. His work at Obermann ranges from calendaring to social media strategizing. We're so glad to have found him!
What inspired you to choose pharmacy as both your major and career path?
WZ: I think the foundational inspiration that led me to decide pharmacy as my major was COVID. I was really inspired by the way our medical researchers and our pharmacists became a critical step in getting the pandemic under control, getting our kids, including myself, back in school, and getting people back to work. In addition, throughout my life, I have always wanted to have a career within the healthcare industry, as well as working and serving local communities like my hometown. Pharmacy is a great example of a healthcare career that serves communities across the nation in providing life-saving medications for all.
Future pharmacists wouldn't typically be drawn to an Obermann communications job, but you were. Why do you think that is?
WZ: I think that no matter which career one chooses, being able to communicate effectively is a skill that is valuable both within a job and outside a job in our everyday lives. I have a personal connection to the importance and difficulty of communicating well because English isn’t my first language (Chinese is). During my time learning English and Spanish in school, I learned to communicate in a way that engages a wide range of people and allows them to fully comprehend what I was saying. That's why I was drawn to this particular job, and I hope to further improve my communication skills at Obermann.
What piques your curiosity?
WZ: How interesting and how applicable different areas of studies can be in our everyday lives. For my pharmacy major, I need to take numerous science classes like biology and chemistry; I'm so intrigued by these two fields in particular because they essentially explain both the makeup of human beings and the makeup of the world around us. I get so excited when I’m in these classes because I know that I can apply them outside of the classroom. The same is true of other fields, like history, English, and another one of my favorites: American politics. (One thing to take away: I’m a big chemistry, biology, and politics kind of guy.)
What has surprised you about your university experience so far?
WZ: The most surprising aspect of my university experience so far has been the ways you can spend your time in Iowa City. Yes, school does take up the vast majority of the time that students have, but since campus is so intertwined with the downtown area and places are so accessible by walking, biking, or taking a Cambus, you can take a break from school without having to spend a lot of time commuting from point A to point B. That allows me to be able to enjoy life outside of school.
What, aside from a degree, would you like to gain from your undergraduate experience?
WZ: I would like to become an RA to develop better research skills and dive into more research opportunities, as well as make the most of my undergraduate experience. It's really important for me not only to be academically successful but also to be well-rounded outside the classroom. So far, I've become a finance senator for Catlett Residence Hall, a Hawk the Vote ambassador, and a research lab assistant for the Department of Internal Medicine. I also hope to volunteer my time at UIHC and become a student pharmacist when I officially enroll in the College of Pharmacy!
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Indigenous Mississippi
Humanities Without Walls Project Features Work by Two University of Iowa Scholars
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Indigenous Mississippi is a digital archive of the work created by an interdisciplinary, multi-university, multi-year research project on indigenous art and activism about the Mississippi River. Over the course of several years, professors, graduate students, artists, and activists collaborated to tell stories that follow the flow of the Mississippi River in order to study how indigenous peoples confront life and make art in the midst of changing climates. Project members included former UI faculty member Jacki Rand, now at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Phillip Round (English).
The group explored the Mississippi River Valley as a bellwether of changing climates. Across several years, they asked how indigenous art and activism engages and contests these changes, while also examining how settler colonists have attempted to justify claims to the river valley and re-engineer its flows. They write of their process, "Collaboration was a central methodology: We met together in locations along the river over the course of three years, beginning in Ojibwe, Dakota, and Ho-Chunk lands on the upper parts of the river, continuing to Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Miami, Menominee, and Ho-Chunk lands in the river’s middle section, and going on to Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Quapaw lands in the river’s southern reaches. This website reflects both the ongoing conversations of the grant participants and our conversations with Indigenous artists and activists."
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Working to Create Nets:
A Humanities for the Public Good Update
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Back when we all traveled regularly to conferences, we did so to share research, to learn from colleagues, and to form new relationships, even friendships, rooted in shared intellectual interests. Conferences help graduate students build skills—capturing complex arguments in short presentations, public speaking, asking helpful rather than grandstanding questions, connecting with fellow experts, and more. In other words, conferences are for networking.
Scholars can find that word discomfiting—interpreting networking as mutual exploitation rather than mutual support. In our Humanities for the Public Good work, the 30 faculty, staff, and students who served as our very energetic Advisory Board and the hundreds of people who attended our workshops and webinars offered the very best kind of networking. Many of us made it through the loneliness of COVID in part due to our weekly HPG working group gatherings—as we became a kind of campus safety net—a caring web of like-minded, curious, creative, caring, transformative revisionists of graduate education.
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Featured Obermann Working Group Events
10/27, 3:30, Zoom
According to WG director Hayley O'Malley, "Dr. Kristen Warner is, without a doubt, one of the smartest thinkers today on all things related to media, race, and representation. If you watch television, are on social media, or have ever picked up a celebrity news magazine (so, all of us), you need to hear what Dr. Warner has to say about what she’s termed 'plastic representation.' More broadly, her work powerfully demonstrates that academic scholarship can be fun and engaging and matter far beyond the walls of academia. She shows us that not only should we study popular culture, but we must." Come for Dr. Warner’s talk; stay for the lively conversation!
10/28, 3:30, Zoom
The group is reading three online articles by Nick Sousanis, Professor at San Francisco State University and the first of a growing number of scholars translating research into graphic forms. At Friday's event, they'll explore the potential of creative dissertations. In the meantime, you might find the fascinating webinar on Next Generation Dissertations for Engagement and the Academy—an Obermann, Humanities for the Public Good, and Syracuse University collaboration—of interest. It includes dissertators and directors of a wide variety of dissertations and a stirring speech on humanities graduate education by our very own Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese.
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Awards, Accomplishments, & Other Happy News |
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Ebenezer Olamiposi Adeyemi (HPG intern) was awarded a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant by the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct anthropological research in Nigeria for his dissertation project, "Community-Developed Infrastructure and the Management of Malaria in the Informal Settlement of Makoko, Lagos, Nigeria."
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Marie Kruger (Humanities Symposium; Co-sponsorship) authored a chapter, "Heritage, Narrative, and the Role of the Humanities in Populist Times" in the newly published Cultures of Populism: Institutions, Practices, and Resistance (Routledge).
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Tori Forbes (Graduate Institute) was awarded the 2022 James Van Allen Natural Science Fellowship.
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Russ Ganim (Advisory Board) and Katie Imborek (Obermann Conversations) were awarded 2022 Michael J. Brody Awards for Faculty Excellence in Service.
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Gabrielle Foreman (Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry) has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for "setting a new standard for digital and collaborative humanities scholarship while also uncovering histories of African American organizing that are still relevant and resonant today."
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