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Upcoming Events
Obermann co-sponsored
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Oliver Twist - Conversations & Controversies, March 5, 7pm, Iowa City Public Library. Dickens' classic novel about poverty in Victorian England will be the focus of this C&C event, co-sponsored with POROI, ICPL, and Prairie Lights. Twenty-five free copies of the book are available to participants at Prairie Lights Bookstore. The store is also offering 20% off all Dickens' books in March in honor of the author's 200th birthday; proceeds go to the Food Bank.
The Art of Interdisciplinarity - A Conversation with Prof. Richard Handler, March 5, 3:00 PM, Obermann Center. This informal conversation is geared toward graduate students and faculty wishing to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and research.
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Publications, Awards & Presentations
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Karla McGregor (Communication Sciences & Disorders, CLAS) a Spring 2011 Obermann Fellow-in-Residence, has received a more than $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for a proposal she wrote while at Obermann, "Memory and World Learning." The grant provides 5 years of support (2012-2016) for research aimed at understanding and improving verbal learning in college students with language learning disabilities.
Loren Glass (English, CLAS) and Charles Williams (PhD candidate in American Studies, CLAS) have published Obscenity and the Limits of Liberalism with the Ohio State Press. Glass directed the 2006-07 Obermann Humanities Symposium, Indecency and Obscenity, from which the book derived.
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| BROKE - New book reveals the people behind the statistics
In 2008, Katie Porter, then a UI College of Law professor, proposed a topic for the Obermann Summer Seminar on consumer debt in America. For two weeks the following summer, she and a group of eleven participants--including professors in Law, Psychology, Urban & Regional Planning and Medicine--met at Obermann to discuss different perspectives on this topic. Each participant came with a draft of a paper, which he or she then honed into a final book chapter.
Now, with publication from Stanford University Press, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class, Porter's book could not be more timely. Americans are still struggling not only to recover from the recession that was hitting just as the Summer Seminar took place, but to understand it. Professor Porter (KP), now at UC-Irvine, chatted with Obermann Assistant Director, Jennifer New (JN), about the project.
JN: Why did you propose this topic, both with regard to your own scholarly interests and where the country was at the time of your application?
KP: In 2008, when I proposed the seminar, the economy was reeling from the financial crisis. The federal government was rescuing major financial institutions, and people did not know whether the situation was going to improve or worsen. The financial crisis certainly made consumer debt a timely topic for the 2009 seminar. In the Introduction to Broke, however, I explain that the run-up in consumer debt is a long-term phenomenon. It reflects major structural changes in the economy and is rewriting the rules for middle class families about how to achieve and maintain prosperity. My own interest in consumer debt comes in part from growing up in rural Iowa during the farm crisis of the 1980s. I watched farmers and small town citizens struggle against foreclosure, bankruptcy, job loss, and the family stress of financial problems. Those personal observations motivated me to study how debt can destabilize communities and families, and how the law can offer relief from overindebtedness.
JN: Elizabeth Warren was part of the seminar and co-authors a chapter of
the book. A professor at Harvard, she has since served as an assistant to
President Obama and a special advisory to the Secretary of the Treasure on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She is now running for the U.S. Senate. Did you know Professor Warren going into the Seminar and what did her participation bring to the group?
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Humanities and Public Life
UI Press Partners with Obermann and the John Nicholas Brown Center for new book series
"We received our first inquiry within 58 minutes of announcing the series!" says Catherine Cocks, Acquisitions Editor for the UI Press regarding its new series Humanities and Public Life. The series is co-edited by Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center, and Anne Valk, Associate Director of the John Nicholas Brown Center for the Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University, and features short, innovative books. Each will examine a project in which academic artists and humanities scholars collaborate with public partners through the arts and humanities.
While the UI Press is especially known for its titles in literary criticism and regional natural history, Cocks said that the series is an effort to broaden their focus, especially in new areas of scholarship. "We are getting great feedback about this series and the need for it," Cocks says. "We seem to be about halfway through a wave of institutionalizing civic engagement, and people are eager for works that critically examine this area."
She said that Mangum and Valk have provided a much clearer structure for manuscripts than is common. Their guidelines invite authors to document the process of creating a project, to share goals and instructive failures as well as successes, and to explain how the partners assessed the impact of the projects on both the community and the artist or scholar's work. Mangum and Valk describe their vision of the series as part documentary, part exhibition, and part interpretation and reflection on publicly engaged arts and humanities.
"We want these to be very practical books," says Cocks, "but we also hope that they'll capture the pleasure and excitement that scholars, community partners, and participants have for this work."
For more information about the series, visit the UI Press' guidelines.
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Obermann Working Groups Look Ahead to Second Year
2011-2012 has been the inaugural year for the Obermann Working Groups. This program, modeled on successful programs at several centers around the country, is intended to provide space, structure, and discretionary funding for groups of faculty and advanced graduate students with a shared intellectual interest.
We have had four Working Groups this year:
- Intergenre Explorations
- Women's Health and Empowerment
- Arts, Humanities, and Technology Interdisciplinary Collaborative
- Circulating Culture
Expected to meet once a month during the semester, groups should have a minimum of six members. These inaugural groups have used their time to prepare for grants or develop proposals for university-wide programs, or as an opportunity to share ideas and work with colleagues from across campus. The program is especially valuable for developing new areas of research across or between disciplines.
 | | Jen Silverman |
The Intergenre group, which explores ways of crossing the divide between scholarship and creative work, includes members from History, Theatre Arts, American Studies, English, Sociology, Rhetoric, Cinema & Comparative Literature, Communication Studies, and Art & Art History. Members have had the opportunity to share their work and receive feedback. They have used some of their funds to collaborate with two scholars, including the playwright, Jen Silverman, who will come to campus for a staged reading of her original play inspired by the memoir of one of the group members who usually does more traditional historical research.
The Circulating Culture group is also hosting a visitor, former UI Cinema professor Dudley Andrew, who will present his recent work on the international circulation of film. Laurie Graham (Anthropology, CLAS) the director of this working group, calls it a "scholarly/professional oasis," adding, "In the midst of our hectic schedules, we look forward to meeting each month at the Obermann Center to focus on our intellectual growth and the community-building that has evolved alongside of it."
Applications for next year's Working Groups are being accepted now through the first Tuesday in April. Vie w the application checklist.
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