2015–2016 Obermann Center Annual Report

Letter from Our Director

Obermann Center — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 14:16:57 +0000

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I often find the best inspiration for the year ahead is a quick look in the rearview mirror. That’s certainly true for the Obermann Center, where that mirror frames a panorama of fellow travelers—faculty, staff, students, and partners—in 2015–16.

In Summer 2015, faculty with Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants created digital models that track early modern publications, improvised imaginative ways to teach media literacy, and filmed a documentary about African American economic challenges and opportunities in Detroit. Professor David Stern gathered philosophers from Britain and the U.S. for the Summer Research Seminar. Together, they drafted essays that will contextualize an important new publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s legendary 1930s Cambridge lectures.

Our offices were filled with Fellows-in-Residence from the UI, the University of Kansas, and Augsburg and Grinnell Colleges. They balanced focused research behind closed doors with lively exchanges in the biweekly Fellows’ seminars.

Spanish and Portuguese professors Denise Filios and Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez dedicated the 2015 Obermann Humanities Symposium to the 400^th anniversary of Don Quixote. They welcomed fascinating international scholars and, with colleagues across campus, organized concerts, exhibits, screenings, and a wildly successful Senior College class.

The Center also marked important milestones this year. A spring reunion/symposium honored the 10^th anniversary of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, a longtime collaboration with the Graduate College. In May, the first two books in the Humanities and Public Life series launched a joint venture between the Center and the University of Iowa Press.

Even as our cross-disciplinary impact stretches across the campus and community through Working Groups, Obermann Conversations, and wide-ranging collaborations, I am proud on our collective behalf that the Center’s work keeps garnering national attention. Membership in the Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls consortium sent graduate students to Chicago for a career institute. The Mellon-funded Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry partnership with Grinnell College inspired new projects and partnerships. And UI faculty and students benefited from our membership in the National Humanities Alliance, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, and the Dickens Project (a collaboration with the UI English Department).

As I explained in a recent Iowa Now article, interdisciplinary work flourishes at Iowa thanks to the fertile imaginations of UI artists, humanities scholars, and social science and scientific researchers. I keep finding that disciplinary differences inspire rather than divide most of us. I welcome you to share your own projects, suggestions, and wildest dreams. Our funds are limited, but we are always happy to offer advice and tap our networks.

I am, as always, indebted to the unfailingly generous and extraordinarily talented Obermann staff—Jennifer New, Erin Hackathorn, and our new colleague Jenna Hammerich. The Center was also enriched by the talents of our 2015–16 graduate assistants, Miriam Janechek and Khoa-Trinh (KT) Nguyen. I also greatly appreciate the support of the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, especially Vice President Dan Reed and Assistant Vice President Ann Ricketts, and the collegiality, hard work, wit, and wisdom of our several advisory boards.

Finally, many, many thanks to those who have donated to the Center this year. I hope this report will inspire you to join the Center in championing the creativity, imagination, and achievements of University of Iowa artists and scholars in the years ahead.

For now, don’t miss the pleasure of glancing through Obermann’s rearview mirror.

I eagerly anticipate traveling the highways and byways of intellectual adventures with many of you—faculty, staff, students, partners, and supporters—on another fascinating journey through the coming year.

With warmest gratitude,

Fellows-in-Residence

Obermann Center — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 15:02:38 +0000

Obermann Center Fellows-in-Residence fully devote themselves to projects within an interdisciplinary community. The program supports artists, researchers, and scholars during periods when focus and feedback are crucial. The program is rooted in our mission: to support the work of individual scholars, while also providing them with the opportunity to enrich a single, discipline-specific project through interdisciplinary exchanges with a lively intellectual community of Fellows.

Why I Give to Obermann

Obermann Center — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 14:35:30 +0000

The Obermann Center holds a special place in my heart. This is so not because of Director Teresa Mangum’s southern charm or the cookies in the kitchen, although both are gifts to all who visit. Instead, I love Obermann for what it offers to scholars on this campus, and for the opportunities it has given me to be in community with these very scholars.

Obermann offers the impetus and the resources for people from across campus to come together to explore and create.

The Obermann Center is a living symbol of the best that universities can be: spaces for collaborative exploration and dialogue. Where else on campus do we see professors of music, history, and occupational health congregating together? University departments have fallen victim to increased specialization, and this trend, coupled with growth, means that more often than not we are in separate buildings spread across campus. Now we are more likely to encounter one another at Pancheros than in an academic setting. Obermann offers the impetus and the resources for people from across campus to come together to explore and create.

The Obermann Center has also been the home of the Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy, which has offered me the most enriching experiences of my professional life. I was fortunate to co-direct the Institute for two sessions, working with Teresa Mangum and with Rachel Williams in successive winters. Teaching with these two stands out among the many highlights of my time at the University of Iowa. Teresa and Rachel brought joy and reflective thought to the classroom, although in distinctive ways. Teresa would offer a slow drawn comparison to literature past; Rachel would point out a quick connection to a pressing social issue. Both approached teaching with the passion of artists and the thoughtfulness of a loving (yet sometimes stern) parent. I learned so much from them and from the Graduate Fellows who challenged us every single day.

Obermann [must] thrive as a space where faculty like me are brought into community with others who challenge and refresh.

More than anything else here at Iowa, I want Obermann to thrive. So the University can be what I feel it must be, I need Obermann to thrive as a space where faculty like me are brought into community with others who challenge and refresh. I give to Obermann because it has given to me.

—Ken Brown, Professor and Associate Dean, Tippie College of Business and longtime donor to the Obermann Center

Thank you to the following faculty, staff, emeritus faculty, and community friends who have recognized the value of the Obermann Center’s work and our unique role at the University of Iowa. Your gifts make our work not only possible but more creative and further-reaching.

Ken Brown and Amy Kristof-Brown
Jonathan and Susan Carlson
Carolyn Colvin
Alice Davison
Virginia Dominguez
Claire Fox and Peter Balestrieri
Carolyn Copps Hartley and John Hartley
Lyell Henry and Gretchen Holt
David and Sheryl Lohman
Teresa Mangum and Corey Creekmur
Mary New
Charles and Mary Ann Peters
James and Beth Peterson
Ann and David Ricketts
John and Trudi Rosazza
Susan Shullaw
Jesse Singerman
Jane Van Voorhis and Kurt Anstreicher

10th Anniversary of the Graduate Institute – A Working Symposium

Obermann Center — Sun, 21 Aug 2016 15:26:56 +0000

A Working Symposium is organized at the discretion of the director to highlight emerging work at the University of Iowa, while also bringing in prominent outside experts to inspire University of Iowa participants to stretch their thinking and their networks. Ample opportunities are provided for participants to share ideas and action steps for greater collaboration on our campus. This year, a very special Working Symposium brought leaders in the publicly engaged arts and humanities to campus, including many Obermann Graduate Institute alumni!

Taking It to the Streets: Celebrating 10 Years of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement & the Academy

When the Graduate Institute was formed ten years ago, its original co-directors, Teresa Mangum (now Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies) and David Redlawsk (now a faculty member at the University of Delaware) weren’t certain who would apply. They were also challenged to find mentors and models because public engagement was just emerging as an option for scholars whose work bridged social activism and more traditional research and teaching.

Flash-forward a decade, and the highly competitive Graduate Institute has had nearly 200 participants, including students from every UI college except Pharmacy. Nine University of Iowa faculty members have served as co-directors. Of our alumni who are now in tenure-track positions, 50 percent have said that their participation in the Institute played an important role in helping them secure their jobs.

The work of the Graduate Institute is grounded in the following definition from Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a consortium to which the University of Iowa belongs: “Public scholarship is scholarly or creative work integral to a faculty member’s academic area. It is jointly planned, carried out, and reflected on by co-equal university and community partners. And it yields one or more public good products.”

The two-day symposium offered keynotes by visiting scholars and engagement experts Adam Bush, Provost of College Unbound, and Jennifer Scott, Director of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at the University of Illinois–Chicago. Roundtables featured alumni of the Obermann Graduate Institute, who presented their work and shared in conversations about sustainability, reciprocity, funding, collaboration, engagement versus outreach, and more.

Roundtables

Engagement in K–12 Education: Examples of working with K–12 schools — Featured Ted Gutsche (School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Florida International University), Heather Wacha (PhD candidate, History, UI), Janice Byrd (PhD candidate, Counselor Education & Supervision, UI), Michael Overholt (PhD candidate, Classics, UI), and Khirin Carter (UI Women’s Resource & Action Center)
Crossing Boundaries: Practicing engagement in communities outside your own — Featured Kate Kedley (PhD candidate, Language, Literacy, & Culture, UI), Héctor Efrén Flores (poet and activist, Honduras), Tala Al-Rousan (Lown Fellow, Harvard School of Public Health), and Jeannette Gabriel (PhD candidate, Teaching & Learning and Graduate Assistant in the Iowa Women’s Archives, UI)
Engagement and Writing — Featured Kate Kauper (Education, Cornell College) and Bridget Draxler (English, Monmouth College)

Workshops

Valuing Community Partners in Publicly Engaged Scholarship — Featured members of the Scholarship & Public Engagement Working Group (led by Carolyn Colvin, UI College of Education) and several of their public partners from the West Liberty School District
Telling the Story of Engagement: How to document your engagement work and use storytelling devices to further a project — Featured Ted Gutsche (School of Journalism & Mass Communication, Florida International University) and Craig Eley (ACLS Fellow, Wisconsin Public Radio)
Un-ghosting Self and Space: Three art tactics in conversation — Featured Jessica Anthony (Dance, UI), Erica Damman (PhD candidate, Environmental Humanities, UI), and Jen Shook (PhD candidate, English, UI)

The celebration also included a month-long gallery installation at the UI’s Old Capitol Museum that gathered myriad artifacts that vividly demonstrated the creativity, variety, and impact of our Graduate Institute alumni’s engagement projects.

Interdisciplinary Research Grants

Obermann Center — Sat, 20 Aug 2016 16:40:17 +0000

The Obermann Interdisciplinary Research Grants (IDRG) foster collaborative scholarship and creative work by offering recipients time and space to exchange new ideas leading to invention, creation, and publication. For the first time in 2015, groups could choose between two- and four-week residencies. Four groups were in residence during the summer of 2015.

Linked Reading: A New Scalable Model for the Digital Humanities

David Eichmann (School of Library & Information Science, UI)
Blaine Greteman (English, CLAS, UI)
James Lee (English, Grinnell College)

This trio was the first group to be funded by an Iowa Digital Bridges Collaborative Grant, part of the Andrew W. Mellon-funded program Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry. The group’s goal was to link two separate database websites—Greteman and Eichmann’s Shakeospeare database and Lee’s Global Renaissance Project—and thus greatly build the capacity of both. Shakeospeare includes metadata about the makers and sellers of nearly 500,000 books from a 300-year period; the Global Renaissance Project includes the full texts of 25,000 early modern books.

At the heart of their project, “Linked Reading: A New Scalable Model for the Digital Humanities,” is a desire to see how such large datasets can be combined to answer a host of questions about the history of published literary texts, including the impact of those who printed, sold, and circulated these materials. During their residency at Obermann, Greteman and Lee, both Shakespeare scholars, worked on a paper about Othello as a test case. Could they garner a new understanding of the play by unifying their datasets, and what technical bumps would they hit along the way? The site they created from the merging is now live: Linked Reading: Big Data Histories. To learn more about their work, read our feature article, “Beyond the Shiny New Toy—Next Frontier for Digital Humanities.”

Media Literacy Education and the Challenge of Promoting Critical Consumption of News

Melissa Tully (School of Journalism & Mass Communication, CLAS, UI)
Emily Vraga (Communication, George Mason University)

How can media literacy be taught and encouraged within media consumption itself? Vraga and Tully worked from the premise that news media literacy encourages citizens to understand both the role of the press in a democratic society and their own responsibilities to be critical consumers of news content. The two scholars developed four PSA videos, which they tested with college students on two campuses. By placing the PSAs as short ads at the beginning of actual YouTube video clips, they gained insight into the effectiveness of news media literacy messages that are embedded in other media.

Since their summer residency, Vraga and Tully have presented a paper on their preliminary findings at the 2016 Southern Political Science Association’s annual conference and submitted a paper to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s annual conference. In addition, they published an article about their research in the Journal of Media Literacy Education.

“The IDRG was incredibly valuable to our work on news media literacy,” says Tully. “Having the time and space to work together gave Emily and me an opportunity to finalize existing projects and launch a new multi-methods project that seeks to better understand how news media literacy messages function and how people use news media literacy skills in their everyday lives.”

Developing the Terra Biblica and BAM (Big Ancient Mediterranean) Online Resources

Sarah Bond (Classics, CLAS, UI)
Paul Dilley (Religious Studies and Classics, CLAS, UI)
Ryan Horne (History, University of North Carolina)

This group developed the technical framework and project workflow for BAM (Big Ancient Mediterranean), an information portal containing open-access tools and online resources that helps scholars around the world study the development of ancient social groups over multiple centuries. During their residency, Bond, Dilley, and Horne focused on Terra Biblica, a tool for the geospatial analysis/plot-mapping of biblical and related literature.

In addition to launching a beta version of the site and leading a virtual tour of the site for the Oxford Patristics Studies Conference (August 2015), the group also submitted an article for a special journal issue on Digital Classics and began planning for a major conference on BAM (the 2016 Obermann Summer Seminar).

“The two weeks of intensive collaboration at Obermann made possible through the IDRG were instrumental in launching our site,” says Paul Dilley. “Even though our work is digital, there’s no substitute for sitting down at the table together, with or without laptops, and brainstorming about the project.”

Detroit Dreams: Economic Decline, Corrosive Community, and the Future of African Americans in the Post-Industrial City

Yvonne Shirley (Filmmaker, Brooklyn, New York)
Jessica Welburn (Sociology and African American Studies, CLAS, UI)

Shirley and Welburn, inspired by Detroiters’ resiliency in the face of significant obstacles, produced a documentary film that investigates how working-class and middle-class African Americans in Detroit navigate the city’s collapsed infrastructure.

Detroit once provided African Americans with the opportunity to pursue the American Dream. Many African Americans moved to Detroit during the early- and mid-twentieth century for auto industry jobs, a pathway to middle-class security. But when deindustrialization caused jobs to evaporate, African Americans’ chances for upward mobility in that city stalled. High unemployment rates, high poverty rates, high crime rates, and high levels of blight plunged Detroit into post-industrial decline. Despite these obstacles, the city remains an important place for African Americans—80 percent of the city’s population—who work daily to survive.

Learn more about our Interdisciplinary Research Grants.

Humanities Symposium: Don Quixote

Obermann Center — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 15:26:26 +0000

The purpose of the Obermann Humanities Symposium is to explore an important humanities topic that highlights UI scholars and scholarship. Often interdisciplinary, the Symposium can include public events, lectures, and related courses.

Don Quixote in the Age of Electronic Reproduction

Organized by Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS) and Denise Filios (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS), the 2015-16 Obermann–International Programs Humanities Symposium focused both on Don Quixote in its 17th-century context and on its long afterlife in world culture, including translation and adaptation to various media. The symposium featured panel discussions, lectures, and presentations by some of the most prestigious specialists in Spanish, Latin American, and global culture.

Visit the lively conference website.

Outcomes:

Explored the relevance of Don Quixote‘s characters and social themes that deeply resonate in Iowa today
Collaborated with UI and community partners to create new work, exhibitions, concerts, and talks that attracted a diverse audience, including art exhibitions at the Old Capitol Museum in conjunction with Iowa City’s Harte School of Art and the UI Museum of Art and a production of Man of La Mancha featuring local musicians
Inspired the co-directors to create Quixote-themed events each year, to reinforce community connections forged and to keep alive Iowa City’s love of “the Don”
Raised the profile of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese by bringing eminent national and international scholars to campus
Made Spanish culture, language, and literature more visible to the UI campus and the wider community
Set the stage for a future edited collection with selected works by symposium participants

Symposium Highlights for the Co-Directors:

Denise Filios (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS): “For me personally, the most important outcome was the opportunity the Symposium gave me to experiment by teaching new materials and media, and to encourage my students to create their own Quixote adaptations to play with this classic novel and characters in ways that made them meaningful and significant to their lives. I was so inspired by my students’ creativity in my Quixote course this fall that this spring I’m having students in my class create collaborative music videos to illustrate Latin music, a project that fuses art, technology, cultural understanding, and music into a new product they can share with their friends and families. I would not have assigned such a project without the inspiration of the panel discussion about teaching Quixote in the Midwest and models for innovative ways to engage students in and around Quixote and other often distant and intimidating Hispanic cultural products.”

Ana Rodríguez-Rodríguez (Spanish & Portuguese, CLAS): “The Symposium and related events gave me the opportunity to share with a wider audience what I see in my Don Quixote classes every year: the power of literature and the humanities to change people’s lives, to help us better understand the world and ourselves, and to inspire us to reach for our potential. Also, I established new professional connections on our campus, in the wider Iowa community, and beyond, which will lead to new projects in the near future. For example, I have been contacted to give invited lectures on Don Quixote and early modern culture in general at Coe College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The symposium has inspired me enormously to implement new ideas in my research and my teaching, and its impact on my work will be long-lasting.”

Keynote Speakers:

Barbara Fuchs, professor of Spanish and English at UCLA. She also directs UCLA’s Center for 17th-and 18th-Century Studies and the Clark Memorial Library.
Jenaro Taléns, renowned Spanish essayist, literary critic, and poet. He has been Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Valencia (Spain) and at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).
Eduardo Urbina, professor of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M. He is the founder and director of the Cervantes Project, an online digital humanities archive established in 1996.
David R. Castillo, professor of Romance languages and literatures at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (University of Michigan Press, 2010).
Sherry Velasco, professor of early modern Spanish literature and culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and professor of gender studies at the University of Southern California.

WorldCanvass interview with Symposium Directors

Summer Research Seminar: Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933

Obermann Center — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 16:46:57 +0000

The Obermann Summer Seminar is an opportunity for UI faculty members to lead a major collaborative project with a dozen or more visiting participants that will result in some form of publication or public work. The outcome should make a significant contribution to the fields of the participants, whether as a print or digital publication or in another form that promises real impact.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933: Text & Context

May 18-22, 2015

David Stern (Philosophy), Director of the 2015 Summer Seminar

The 2015 Obermann Summer Seminar was led by David Stern (Philosophy, CLAS). The seminar was built around a discussion of the book he co-edited, Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933, From the Notes of G.E. Moore, which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.

A facsimile edition of source manuscripts is freely available on the Wittgenstein Source website: http://www.wittgensteinsource.org.

Contributors to the Summer Seminar produced essays on the issue, problem, or question they found most provocative in the edition of Moore’s lecture notes that formed the basis for the seminar. Stern will publish an edited collection of these essays as Wittgenstein’s Return to Cambridge: Reflections on the Middle Period.

Wittgenstein: Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1933, From the Notes of G.E. Moore was inspired by a legendary edition of the Moore lecture notes and can be read as a companion to that volume. It also offers the most wide-ranging discussion to date of Wittgenstein’s “middle period” in relation to his early and late philosophical masterpieces, the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations.

Seminar Faculty Participants

Thomas Baldwin, University of York (United Kingdom)
Anat Biletzki, Quinnipiac University and Tel Aviv University (Israel)
Bill Child, Oxford University (United Kingdom)
Gabriel Citron, Yale University
João Vergílio Gallerani Cuter, University of São Paulo (Brazil)
Mauro Engelmann, Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil)
Juliet Floyd, Boston University
Richard Fumerton, University of Iowa
Warren Goldfarb, Harvard University
James Klagge, Virginia Tech
Gregory Landini, University of Iowa
Mathieu Marion, Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada)
Volker A. Munz, Alpen-Adria University (Austria)
Alois Pichler, University of Bergen (Norway)
Tom Ricketts, University of Pittsburgh
Brian Rogers, Stanford University
Hans Sluga, University of California–Berkeley

Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy

Obermann Center — Wed, 17 Aug 2016 16:48:56 +0000

The Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy is a one-week interdisciplinary institute in which UI graduate students from across campus and at any point in their graduate studies explore how public engagement can enhance teaching, research, and creative work.

The tenth year of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy was another wonderful interdisciplinary meeting of some of the most forward-thinking and innovative graduate students on the University of Iowa campus. Led by Jennifer Kayle (Dance, CLAS) and Craig Just (Civil & Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering), the home departments of this year’s 17 participants ranged from Neuroscience to Library and Information Science, while topics for projects included sports as community-building and an art exhibit focused on perceptions of global conflict.

New to the Institute this year was a partnership with Johnson County and a site visit to the county’s former poor farm and asylum. Working with Shanti Sellz, the county’s point person for re-envisioning the use of this space on the west side of Iowa City, the Institute toured the haunting structures on the coldest day of the year. Afterward, local experts presented information about local housing equity and food security, as well as historical representations of mental health, all topics that might be part of the space’s eventual programming and curation. Working in small groups, the Fellows had several days to propose to Sellz their ideas for publicly engaged research and teaching projects that could be enacted at the site.

Remarks from Graduate Fellows at the End of the Week

“The Institute has changed the way I view / frame / think about the work I do (pedagogically, creative, and scholarly). I am so thankful to have new ways to talk about what I do and why it matters. As a result, I now approach my work differently and have begun to think about other ways of knowing and doing.” —2016 Institute member

“I think that this Institute has definitely sparked a change. We can all use something we love to make a difference. It has also really sold the idea that collaborating with people whose fields are completely different from yours is really important to create truly good ideas.” —2016 Institute member

Directors and Senior Fellows

Fellows

Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Without Walls Alternative Academic Career Workshop

Obermann Center — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 14:40:25 +0000

Expanding their sense of how they might use their training as humanities scholars, Erica Damman (Environmental Humanities, CLAS; left) and Noaquia Callahan (History, CLAS; right) participated in the first cohort of the Alternative Academic Career Workshop for Pre-Doctoral Students in the Humanities. The three-week workshop in Chicago was sponsored by Humanities Without Walls (HWW) in collaboration with the Chicago Humanities Festival. HWW is a consortium of humanities centers and institutes from 15 major research universities throughout the Midwest led by Antoinette Burton, Professor and Director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC).

Chicago as Backdrop and Playground for Alt-Ac Exploration

Damman and Callahan, along with 28 other fellows—two from each consortium university—visited museums, libraries, hybrid cultural sites, a design thinking lab, and an internationally acclaimed advertising agency. They held extensive conversations about career paths with curators, editors, entrepreneurs, artists, consultants, event organizers, and recently graduated PhD recipients.

The Expansive Humanities PhD

“Never before have I thought of how expansive the humanities PhD and my skill set could be,” says Damman. Both she and Callahan are previous Obermann Graduate Institute Fellows, and Damman says that the HWW Workshop reminded her of the Institute in that once again she was “in the company of brilliant, kind people whose compass is set toward social impact and a more imaginative, inclusive view of the world.” (To gain some sense of Damman’s workshop experience, take a look at her blog posts from last summer, including one in which she wrote,

“I sat there and realized that the HWW workshop would be the beginning of a radical redefinition of myself, how I self-identify, and how I project my expertise outside the academy.”)

Transferable Skills

Callahan, who spent the 2015–16 academic year as a Doctoral Fellow in African American History at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, and recently won a Fulbright Award, agrees that the workshop exposed her to a variety of careers both inside and outside the academy. It also helped her to better understand how to venture outside the academy: “While I’ve always been interested in exploring my career options beyond the academy, figuring out how was a constant frustration. Through a series of presentations, group exercises, and informational interviews, HWW equipped me with the tools necessary to use networking, resume writing, and social media to be successful on the job market. Of equal importance, I learned how my work as a doctoral student in history, as a researcher, and as a community service organizer has cultivated a transferable skill set that is desirable to a wide range of employers.”

Callahan hopes to work in the world of foundations or with the U.S. State Department, while Damman is pursuing options that include forming or working for an environmental consultancy group, coordinating environmental efforts at the city level, and being an independent artist/writer. As she weighs options, Damman says,

The workshop taught me how to take ownership of my multi-hyphenated interests. Reframing is not just a way of adopting the language of an outside world or translating my academic skills, but recognizing the value and need for people who think from a humanist viewpoint…. I do not exaggerate when I say this was a life-changing experience!

The summer 2017 Humanities Without Walls graduate summer program is open to any graduate student in the United States. (The summer 2018 program will be open only to graduate students at HWW consortium schools.) To learn about the application process for 2017, see our website.

Working Groups

Obermann Center — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 16:50:13 +0000

The Scholarship of Public Engagement Working Group

Obermann Center Working Groups provide space, structure, and discretionary funding for groups of faculty and advanced graduate students with a shared intellectual interest. Groups have used this opportunity to explore new work, to share their own research, to organize a symposium, and to develop grant proposals. In 2015–16, the Obermann Center hosted 18 Working Groups.

Select Working Group Highlights

Place-Based Inclusion Working Group

Hosted a one-day seminar, “Are U a Good Neighbor?”, in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the University of Iowa Office of Outreach and Engagement. Three invited speakers addressed the role of universities in furthering fair and affordable housing in their communities.

Social Justice Education Working Group

Discussed Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice and Liberation by Laura I. Rendón
Studied diverse perspectives on and approaches to social justice education research through exchanges about members’ scholarship, teaching, and service
Hosted guest speaker Héctor Efrén Flores, a social justice activist and poet from Honduras, who discussed social justice education in his country

In addition to integrating our readings into our courses, members unanimously concur that the intellectual energy of the group has powered them to be productive: publications of articles, advancement on books in progress, submission of book proposals and articles, invited lectures and keynote talks, field works in national and international sites and research centers. ~Circulating Cultures’ final report

Circulating Cultures Working Group

Collaborated with the Contemporary Literary and Film Theory Working Group for a combined session with cultural theorist Mary Louise Pratt
Read and discussed three books: Writing History in the Global Era by Lynn Hunt; The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud; and In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh

Scholarship of Public Engagement Working Group

Worked on their ICARE grant project, prepared an IRB application for community engagement, and created a heat map for use by researchers interested in health-related topics in Iowa
Participated in the tenth anniversary of the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy by leading a fishbowl activity with public partners
Created pathways for a presentation at the Upper Midwest Civic Engagement Summit in May 2016

Opera Studies Forum

Offered Met Live lectures by Katherine Eberle Fink (Music, CLAS) on Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles; Miriam Gilbert (emeritus, English, CLAS) on Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux; and Nathan Platte (Music, CLAS) on Strauss’s Elektra

History Corps

History Corps graduate students and advisor Jacki Rand (who appear in the topmost photo) prepared to perform fieldwork at Meskwaki Settlement and Iowa Reservation in support of the project “Iowa Native Spaces: A Collaborative Digital Mapping Project.”