Are you an assistant or associate professor in the final stages of writing a book-length project? Apply for a Book Ends grant and get excellent advice from two internal and two external experts to guide your final revisions.

Read comments from previous awardees about how powerful and inspiring they’ve found our Book Ends seminars.



Final Round of Mellon Humanities for the Public Good Grants

Apply now for funded opportunities!

GRADUATE STUDENTS: Apply for Fall 2023 Graduate Research Assistantship by February 15! (Summer funding is also available.)

The Obermann Center is looking for a graduate student scholar-teacher who is interested in conducting and sharing research on the larger ecosystem of the humanities and diverse careers for humanities scholars and learning the skills necessary to be a successful project director as well as scholar. The graduate assistant will work closely with the HPG Advisory Committee as we harvest the knowledge from the work we have done in the past four years, launch new humanities labs, move forward with plans for a certificate and possible future MA, and share our work with others through a fall national gathering and a final public report.

FACULTY: Apply for $15K summer funding to transform a graduate seminar to a Humanities Lab by March 7 and secure $10K for your department!

When you transform your graduate seminar into a Humanities Lab, you'll give students the opportunity to engage in collaborative, public-facing projects that contribute to the public good, foster a socially just approach to equity and inclusion in work practices and workplaces, and equip students with crucial skills for various careers while also adding an exciting new experiential offering to your department’s graduate offerings (without disrupting the existing curriculum). The $15K supports a summer team you put together which can include faculty, graduate students, staff, and community partners who help you to plan this new kind of course. To honor your department’s support for experimentation, we also provide $10K in supporting funds to your department.

Arthur & Shea Awarded OVPR Funding as Community Engaged Scholars

In collaboration with the Obermann Center, the Research Development Office has selected two UI faculty to receive funding from the Seeding Excellence Initiative as OVPR Community Engaged Scholars (Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences). This award provides one-year awards of up to $5,000 to faculty pursuing collaborative, publicly engaged research projects in the arts, humanities, and social sciences that mutually benefit university scholarship and the engaged community.

We're delighted that both of the Fall 2022 winners incubated their projects at the Obermann Center!

Loyce Arthur (Theatre Arts) was selected for her project, “Art and Money for the Public Good: Overcoming Barriers to Civic Engagement.” Arthur directed the Obermann Working Group Developing Social Practice and Public Engagement as Course Content from 2015 to 2018. For her new project, she'll partner with Travis Kraus (Planning & Public Affairs; Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities) and his students to examine how innovative methods of public engagement can increase civic participation among historically underrepresented and low participation groups. The work will focus on Iowa City’s Pheasant Ridge neighborhood and focus on artist-led creative processes and the mitigation of financial barriers to increase participation and change attitudes about civic engagement.

Christine Shea (Spanish & Portuguese; Linguistics) received funding for her project, “Equity and Herencia: Designing and Implementing Heritage Spanish Speaker Classes in Iowa City High Schools.” Shea, who co-directs the Obermann Working Group Spanish Heritage Speakers in the Classroom, will collaborate with a teacher in the Iowa City Community School District to design and implement surveys of Spanish heritage speaking students, teachers, and district administrators. The surveys will address the question of how Spanish heritage speaker classes affect students’ linguistic identity and how they identify as Latinx/o/a in a predominantly White high school and state.

And congratulations to the following friends of Obermann, whose projects we may not have seeded, but whose interdisciplinary efforts we're always delighted to celebrate:

David Cwiertny (Civil Engineering & Chemistry) and his team received Interdisciplinary Scholars award for “Climate-driven health vulnerabilities of rural well users”; and Marc Linderman (Geographical and Sustainability Sciences) and his team received the same award for “Interactive Impacts of Farmers’ Mental Health Well-being and Climate Variability.”

Drawing Panels & Crossing Borders

Feb. 9, 10, 11 event features comics artists, scholars on colonial dynamics

Join us—and please invite your students—to the next Mellon Sawyer Seminar events on February 9, 10, and 11! The third public symposium in our Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Racial Reckoning through Comics will focus on strategies for negotiating representation of self and other—and their interactions—in comics.

Extending from the global to the local, from international conflicts to the encounters of our everyday lives, prominent comics artists Joe Sacco and MariNaomi, along with groundbreaking scholars Candida Rifkind, José Alaniz, and Jorge Santos Jr., will will guide us through comics that highlight historically underrepresented individuals and communities, both as creators and characters. Anyone interested in the powerful ways popular culture can intersect with questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, or with the ongoing legacies of historical marginalization as well as persistent battles for social justice should find these presentations rewarding and perhaps inspiring.

The free event will take place in-person and online.

AND, on February 9 at 6:30, join us for a special event with Joe Sacco (Safe Area Gorazde, Paying the Land), as he discusses race, war, identity, and his personal creative process with Rachel Williams at the UI Main Library.

My Electric Genealogy Comes to the UI

Live performance by Sarah Kanouse blends essay, documentary, storytelling

“For nearly 40 years," explains Sarah Kanouse, an interdisciplinary artist (and one-time professor in the UI's Intermedia Program), my grandfather worked for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, designing, planning, and supervising the network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of electricity. The grid was his second family: when he died, he left behind boxes of snapshots that mixed birthday parties and family Christmases with portraits of power plants and transmission towers. Years later, I learned his legacy also included some of the most polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in the country—much of it located out of state, on Indigenous land. As these power plants finally and belatedly come down, what is owed the communities long harmed by this infrastructure?”

Kanouse’s solo performance of My Electric Genealogy will take place at 6:30, Monday, February 13, at 240 Art Building West. It's free and open to all.

Naomi Greyser (English, American Studies, GWSS) and Heather Parrish (Printmaking) were instrumental in bringing this nationwide performance to the UI campus. Says Greyser, "I was listening to a news report about the success of the 1987 Montreal Accord that all but eradicated ozone-depleting chemicals. The science of understanding the drop in ozone—along with international diplomacy—were crucial. A director at NASA, though, emphasized the role of art and culture in, quite literally, saving the planet from radiation. Today, we face a problem of an infrastructure literally built on (and with) fossil fuels. And built on tribal homelands. Transforming that energy infrastructure requires imagination alongside science and policy. I am SO excited to engage Sarah’s performance and learn, through her story, about our intimate entanglements with energy history and oil. Ultimately, extricating ourselves from fossil fuel entails a public reckoning with U.S. settler theft of tribal homelands and nature itself."

Please encourage your students to attend this imaginative and interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis! Kanouse will engage climate science, civil engineering and design challenges, environmental history, race gender and colonialism, and self-reflection in relation to intergenerational family dynamics.

The performance is co-sponsored by the Obermann Center, American Studies, English, Environmental Sciences, Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies, and POROI.