Lauren Burrell Cox is Obermann's New Assistant Director!

Community-oriented researcher, podcaster, & humanities advocate joins Obermann staff 

We're happy to announce that Lauren Burrell Cox has become Obermann's new Assistant Director! She'll be working with our director, Teresa Mangum, to design, plan, promote and conduct programs and to oversee communications for the Center.

Lauren most recently served as Program Coordinator for the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (CHPS) at the University of Florida, where she received her PhD in English, with a concentration in film and media studies. Her hybrid dissertation project, "Reactivating the Film Archive," focuses on archival and documentary films and film history. In addition to her work with CHPS, she is a researcher for Film Posse Production Company, where she's currently doing archival research for a PBS project on Zora Neale Hurston. Previously, she worked as the Public Relations Coordinator for the Andrew W. Mellon Intersections program at CHPS. 

Lauren is an avid podcaster, having developed, produced, and/or hosted four podcasts, including, most recently, The Hipp Six and Under Review: Rethinking Humanities Graduate Education. For each episode of Under Review, she and co-creator June Ke interview guests about how to rethink humanities graduate education to be more inclusive, student-centered, and adapted for the realities of the job market and diverse post-doctoral pathways. 

Lauren brings extensive experience in collaborative, public-facing work that marries humanistic knowledge with social impact, and is well-versed in public programming, grant writing, community engagement, strategic communications, and the digital humanities.

Send her a welcome note at lauren-cox@uiowa.edu.

April 14-15: Mellon Sawyer Seminar Closing Event

Special guest artists Jaime and Gilbert Hernández

All good things come to an end, and the Racial Reckoning through Comics Mellon Sawyer Seminar could not be prouder to announce the participation of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, creators of the award-winning Love and Rockets comics, for its closing event on April 14-15.

The “Hernandez Bros” are two Latino siblings and arguably the most influential artists in today’s alternative comics. They started in the '80s, depicting the punk scene of LA and the fictional town of Palomar through strong female characters in a world that resembled their own reality, full of people of color and differently abled and LGBTQ characters in complex, fun, sad, and tender stories. They continued publishing their comics for forty years and were the first comics artists to let their characters age accordingly. Now, Maggie, Hopey, Luba, and the others are in their 60s!

Together with “the Bros,” artist Natalia Hernandez and scholars Qiana Whitted and Darieck Scott  will join us for the last round of discussions on racial representation in comics.

Comics at FilmScene

We have partnered with FilmScene for a series of movie adaptations from comics. The series will close with KCET's Love and Rockets: The Great American Comic Book documentary, followed by a Q&A with the Hernandez Brothers.

For more information, please visit our website.

Awards & Accomplishments

• Shannon Lea Watkins ('22 IDRG) was awarded a 2023 OVPR Early Career Scholars Award for her project, “Learning from QueerTok: Developing interactive interview methods to illuminate online experiences of sexual and gender minority young adults.”
• Hannah Bonner (HPG intern, Graduate Institute) was featured in a Graduate College video and article as a UI artist who brings her love of writing and experimental film to the local arts scene.
• Dominic Dongilli (HPG RA, HPG intern) won a Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship and will be spending 2023-24 conducting research and completing his dissertation at the Smithsonian Zoo in Washington, D.C.

FEATURED PODCAST

Careers in the Public Humanities

This podcast explores the broad range of positions and prospects open to humanities scholars beyond the tenure track. It's produced by graduate students in the University of Rhode Island English Department with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Next Generation PhD initiative.

FEATURED VIDEO

"Reforming the Academic Reward System" (2/13/23)

In this webinar from the National Humanities Center, panelists discuss how institutions of higher education can reimagine their protocols for faculty advancement to account for the increasing importance of public engagement, collaborative research, and to recognize new interdisciplinary models of intellectual inquiry across humanities fields.

Panelists include Karida L. Brown (Emory University), Jeffrey Cohen (Arizona State University), and Elizabeth Wood (The Huntington Library).

Summer 2023 Interdisciplinary Research Groups

Six groups tackle pressing issues, artistic questions at Obermann this summer

The following groups of scholars and artists have been awarded two- and four-week residencies at Obermann this summer. Read about each group's project on our website.



• Christine Gill (Neurology), Pamela Mulder (Nursing), and Solange Saxby (Internal Medicine): Breastfeeding for Mothers with Multiple Sclerosis
• Carly Nichols (Geographical & Sustainability Sciences) and Hilary Mosher (Internal Medicine): Ethnography of Nutrition Procurement Strategies of Recently Hospitalized Adults in Rural Iowa Counties
• Jean-François Charles (School of Music), Albert Ratner (Mechanical Engineering), and Frederick Skiff (Physics & Astronomy): Flame Sonification and Flame-Based Audio Effect Processing
• Ebonee Johnson (College of Public Health), Duhita Mahatmya (College of Education), and Kimberly Dukes (Internal Medicine): Healthy Aging across the Life Course: Engaging Multigenerational Families Living with Chronic Conditions
• Allison Rowe (Teaching & Learning), Maia Sheppard (Teaching & Learning), and Nancy Nowacek (Stevens Institute of Technology): Just Crushing: A Demolition Derby
• Lisa Schlesinger (Theatre Arts) and Layale Chaker (independent composer): Ruinous Gods: Suites for Sleeping Children — An Opera

A Discussion with Frequências Symposium Co-Directors

Event will allow students, community unique access to works of art

The 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium and International Programs Major Projects Award, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora, will feature the emerging wave of young Afro-Brazilian filmmakers, curators, programmers, and scholars whose art and scholarship have already had an impact on international cinema. Organized by Christopher Harris, Janaína Oliveira, and Cristiane Lira, the symposium takes place March 30–April 1, 2023, in Iowa City.

Daniel Vorwerk (DV), Event and Communication Project Specialist in International Programs, recently sat down to talk with the co-directors. An excerpt follows. You can read the full interview on IP's website.

DV: What is the importance of this symposium at this moment in time?

Lira: I think this symposium will be a huge opportunity to access the works being developed by Afro-Brazilian women scholars and filmmakers in connection to what is being done in other places regarding the reimagining of the diasporic experience.

In addition, I’m excited for the opportunity that the students will have to gain knowledge surrounding these subjects. This symposium will allow for students and the community to have access to works of art they wouldn’t normally have access to. I’m expecting to see a lot of new things and it’ll be an opportunity to have this collective conversation around Brazilian, specifically Afro-Brazilian women artists, many of whom were producing art during the government of Jair Bolsonaro who was making so many cuts to the arts. It’s so special to have this symposium happening now when we have a new government in Brazil, a new wave of hope. I’m expecting so much from this new government. Brazil was broken by the previous government, and we want it to be fixed and it’s a beautiful moment for us to see this happening.

Oliveira: Thank you for bringing up the funding cuts, Cris, because it’s really nice that we’re making this happen in this new moment for Brazil. It brings us a certain kind of hope and energy because it’s not an easy time right now in Brazil and this gives us hope.

Harris: There are parallels here, of course. That goes back to the original impetus of the proposal. This is an important moment in the history of the U.S. as well, maybe not quite as fraught as the very present in Brazil, but we’re still in the wake, so to speak, of the previous president’s administration. So the place of people of color in this country, and Black people in particular, and the way that gets shaped in filmmaking and in the responses of filmmakers, it’s evolving in the U.S. too. There are relationships and parallels between where the U.S. is today and where Brazil is today, all the way down to how both former presidents of Brazil and the United States had some sort of political, international, geo-political alliance.

Oliveira: There are many crossroads in the world, global politics, migration, etc., that speak to this Frequências symposium [...] I’ve been making programs with Black women filmmakers for a while. In 2018, I did a program on the film landscape in Brazil; Black people are the vanguards, the people who are presenting the most interesting, new, aesthetic narratives. In particular, Black women, when it comes to the films they are making about their diasporic experiences, they’re really framing new cinematic ways of talking about the diaspora.

At the same time in this moment in history, we have these bizarre political forces arising and creating all these events while we also have people that are creating new ways of expressing themselves in films, visual arts, and arts in general. This is why if you look at our program, it’s mainly made by women. This is not an accident.

Full article by Daniel Vorwerk, International Programs