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.
Fall 2018
Mark Berg (Sociology, CLAS)
- Undertook research on the pathways which contribute to childhood stressors that can have profound effects on later-life health
Roxanna Curto (French & Italian, CLAS)
- Worked on a book project, Sporting Identities: Global Sports and National Cultures in French and Francophone Literature
Eric Gidal (English, CLAS)
- Composed and submitted a chapter, “Scottish Poetry and Ecology,” that was accepted for inclusion in The International Companion to Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature, forthcoming in 2020
- Completed work on an article, co-authored with Michael Gavin, University of South Carolina, “Infrastructural Semantics: Postal Directories and Statistical Accounts in Scotland, 1790-1845,” conditionally accepted for publication in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science
- Designed a new course, ENGL 1500: “Introduction to Environmental Literature,” part of the UI Sustainability Certificate
Tammy Nyden (Philosophy, Grinnell College, Digital Bridges Fellow)
- Collaborated with Grinnell College librarians and a student aide on “Digital Stories for Social Justice Collection,” including transcribing and entering meta-data for 25 Mothers on the Frontline interviews
- Organized and facilitated a 2-day workshop, including training interviewers and developing a curriculum
Thomas Oates (American Studies, CLAS)
- Worked on a book project, Crossover: A Cultural History of Playground Basketball, that offers a cultural history of how playground basketball was commodified in various ways in the late 20th and early 21st centuries
- Wrote and submitted an article to the Sociology of Sport Journal: “‘Where I’m From’: Jay-Z’s ‘Hip Hop Cosmopolitanism,’ Basketball, and the Neoliberal Politics of Urban Space”
- With a graduate student colleague, co-authored the article “‘Sport is Argument’: Polarization, Racial Tension, and the Televised Sport Debate Format,” which examines the history and development of debate programs on ESPN and which will appear in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues
Nathan Platte (School of Music, CLAS)
- Researched a new book project, Sounds of Music: Listening to the Films of Robert Wise, which included visiting several archives and research libraries
- Presented a paper at the meeting of the American Musicological Society
- Wrote a book review for the Journal of the Society for American Music
Samuel Rebelsky (Computer Science, Grinnell College, Digital Bridges Fellow)
- Designed a new curriculum for his introductory computer science course, Functional Problem-Solving, as a way to make computer science more accessible and attractive to a broader population of students. His Spring 2019 into course focused on the digital humanities.
- Began compiling a computer science textbook aimed at digital humanities–themed intro courses
Spring 2019
Mariola Espinosa (History and Global Health Studies, CLAS)
- Worked on book manuscript, Fighting Fever in the Caribbean: Medicine and Empire, 1650–1902
- Attended a workshop sponsored by the Journal of Social History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to begin incorporating a visualization about cross-communication regarding racial immunities to yellow fever into a historical argument
Elizabeth Heineman (History, CLAS)
- Drafted and revised a book proposal for Children, Transported
- Researched the U.S.-based chapters of the book
- Supervised undergraduate RAs who were transcribing oral history interviews
Jason Radley (Psychological & Brain Sciences, CLAS)
- Investigated the clinical literature to identify links between his findings on neural pathways in the brain and human brain imaging data
- Worked on a manuscript for publication
Catherine Stewart (History, Cornell College)
- Made substantive progress on her book manuscript, The New Maid: African American Workers and Domestic Service During the Depression
- Wrote and submitted an article to the Journal of American History for formal review
- Wrote and submitted an invited short essay on Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” for a roundtable in the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History
Jenna Supp-Montgomerie (Religious Studies and Communication Studies, CLAS)
- Worked on a book, Fault Lines, which traces the involvement of religion in the the creation and definition of networks
