Congratulations to our next HPG Graduate Assistant—Andrew Boge!

One of the key principles of our work on the Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good graduate education project has been listening to the voices and recommendations of graduate students. We have been grateful for the many smart, insightful graduate students on our advisory board, in our working groups, in our course redesign sessions, and, of course, in our summer graduate internship program. We’ve been especially fortunate in our wonderful HPG graduate assistants.

Therefore, we’re delighted to announce that our new summer and fall 2023 graduate assistant is Andrew Boge, a PHD candidate in Communications Studies. Andrew has served on the advisory board to the grant and was a 2019 HPG intern at the African American Museum of Iowa in Cedar Rapids. There, he researched experiential learning opportunities for high school-aged students around issues of race and history as the Museum developed a new program about the Underground Railroad. Andrew captures his experiences in blogs posts about museum futures and liberatory education and in this video.

Andrew follows in the footsteps of a truly outstanding, passionate, talented group of HPG RAs:

• Aiden Bettine, History and the School of Library and Information Sciences, now Curator of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota
• Victoria (Torie) Burns, English, Writer & Editor, Graduate College, UI
• Dominic Dongilli, American Studies, headed off soon to a Smithsonian Predoctoral Fellowship
• Luke Borland, History, Public Works Communication Specialist, City of West Linn, Oregon

Wide Lens: MEMORY

Interdisciplinary May 5 event at Stanley Museum of Art

What is forgotten? What is remembered? How reliable are our recollections? What ethical questions could or should guide how we engage with others’ memories?

Join us on May 5 at the Stanley Museum of Art as six scholar-artists reflect on memory from the perspective of various disciplines: Paula Amad (Cinematic Arts), Isabel Muzzio, (Psychological and Brain Sciences), Mercedes Bern-Klug (Social Work), Amber Brian (Spanish & Portuguese), Marie Kruger (English and GWSS), and Cory Gundlach (Stanley Museum of Art).

This is the second gathering in the UI's new Wide Lens series, in which researchers, scholars, and artists from across the university briefly present their work on a shared topic of interest, pecha kucha–style, at the Stanley Museum of Art.

Wide Lens is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Stanley Museum of Art. Free and open to all; no RSVP necessary.

Mangum Receives Civic Engagement Leadership Award

Congratulations to Obermann Center director Teresa Mangum, who was recently named the University of Iowa President's awardee of the 2023 Iowa and Minnesota Campus Contact Presidents’ Civic Engagement Leadership Award.

The award recognizes a member of the faculty, administration, or staff or for a group (e.g., advisory committee, task force, project team) that has significantly advanced their campus’ distinctive civic mission by forming strong partnerships, supporting others’ civic and community engagement, and working to institutionalize a culture and practice of engagement.

Mangum is is a longtime champion for public engagement at Iowa and has spearheaded numerous community engagement efforts, including most recently the Mellon-funded Humanities for the Public Good initiative, which is working to develop an interdisciplinary, publicly engaged graduate program focused on preparing humanities students for careers in the public sector. She has served on campus committees that have advanced engagement as a university priority, while also developing the Obermann Center into a leading partner for nonprofit organizations across Iowa City and beyond. Please join us in congratulating her!

FEATURED VIDEO

Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America — A Discussion with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner

On March 2, Tara Bynum (English, University of Iowa) and Kabria Baumgartner (History and Africana Studies, Northeastern University) discussed Bynum's new book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), which tells the stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free.

Baumgartner and Bynum, a 2021 recipient of the Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop award, discussed "the pleasure of reading in the 'archive,' the individual and collective experiences of joy in the lives of Wheatley, Gronniosaw, Marrant, and Walker, and what these 18th-century pleasures mean for us at present."

Obermann Center Symposium’s "Frequências" Film Festival Explores Afro-Brazilian Cinema

Via the Daily Iowan:

The door of no return; the reinvention of belonging; Blackness in Brazil — these topics and more were the focus of this year’s Obermann Humanities Symposium. Presented in Iowa City by the Obermann Humanities Symposium & International Programs Major Project Award, the Frequências festival displayed lectures, cinema screenings, interventions, exhibits, and performances by contemporary Afro-Brazilian artists and scholars discussing Black diaspora.

The festival kicked off on Thursday in FilmScene at The Chauncey. Janaína Oliveira from the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro and Christopher Harris, UI associate professor of cinematic arts, gave opening lectures. Screening[s] of Grace Passô’s República and Vaga Carne (Dazed Flesh) [...], exploring the meanings of Black feminine bodily autonomy, concluded the first night.

[...] “I’m very excited to see how the symposium happening in a city like this brings a lot of Black women, artworks, and very important discussions,” [student collaborator Gleisson] Alves Santos said.

Photo above: Cauleen Smith performs Black Utopia LP

FACULTY: Frequências co-directors and colleagues have assembled a rich resource page full of articles, interviews, podcasts, and videos. We hope they're useful to those of you planning courses or modules on Afro-Brazilian cinema.

Obermann Working Groups

Space, structure, and discretionary funding: Apply by April 11

The Obermann Working Groups program allows participants from across the campus and beyond to explore complex issues at a moment when cross-disciplinary collaboration is crucial to address shifting domains of knowledge and a rapidly changing world. We're now accepting applications for 2023-24 Working Groups.

Apply for Fall 2023 Obermann Faculty Fellows Program

In the past, the Obermann Fellowships were a residency program. However, recognizing that many faculty now work from remote locations during research-intensive semesters, we are trying a new experiment. While we can still offer office space to faculty members who need a retreat, we also welcome applications from faculty who would benefit from participating in the Fellows seminar and the $1,000 research award.

Applications are due May 2, 2023, by 5:00 p.m.

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.

News & Achievements

• Rebekah Kowal (2022 Fellow-in-Residence) and Catherine Welch (2022 IDRG) received 2023 Regents Awards for Faculty Excellence.
• Caleb Pennington (HPG intern) has been awarded the Graduate College's Summer Fellowship for 2023 to work on his dissertation, "Shades of Green: Historical Perceptions of the U.S. Environmental Movement."
• Patrick Johnson (HPG intern) won a 2023 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
• Lina-Maria Murillo (Working Groups) was named the 2023 Early Career Scholar of the Year by the OVPR.
• Berkley Conner (2022 Humanities 3MT winner) won the Jane A. Weiss Memorial Dissertation Scholarship.