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Becky Gonzalez is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics and Director of the Multilingual Syntax Lab. As an Obermann Faculty Fellow, she will be conducting research on the second language acquisition (SLA) of Brazilian Portuguese by native English speakers through an empirical study of word order and subject-verb agreement patterns.
Daniel Fine is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in Performance in the Department of Theatre Arts, Associate Professor in the Department of Dance, and is a core faculty member of the Public Digital Arts Cluster. He is an artist, scholar, and technologist working in immersive, responsive, mediated environments, site-specific locations, and installations for interactive users, audiences, and live performance.
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Featuring former Obermann Advisory Board Member David Cwiertny and former Humanities for the Public Good Board Member Eric Gidal
A new collaboration between engineering and the arts and humanities at the University of Iowa leverages artists, writers, and scholars to put a face on the impacts of nitrogen pollution in waterways and watersheds.
“This project gives voice and narrative to those impacted,” said David Cwiertny, William D. Ashton Professor of Civil Engineering. “How do we make this real? We bring people to the issues through art, dance, creative writing, papermaking.” Cwiertny is the UI lead on the National Science Foundation project called the Blue-Green Action Platform, or BlueGAP, which aims to connect communities across watersheds to address economic and health challenges caused by nitrogen pollution in their water and local environment.
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All are invited to a reading and discussion, co-hosted by the OVPR and Prairie Lights, to celebrate Christopher Goetz’s recent book, The Counterfeit Coin: Videogames and Fantasies of Empowerment. Goetz, Associate Professor and head of film studies in the Department of Cinematic Arts, received a 2021 Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop award to advance work on his manuscript.
After the reading, Corey Creekmur, Associate Professor in Cinematic Arts, will join Goetz for a conversation and Q&A with the audience.
The Counterfeit Coin argues that games and related entertainment media have become almost inseparable from fantasy. In turn, these media are making fantasy itself visible in new ways. Though apparently asocial and egocentric—an internal mental image expressing the fulfillment of some wish—fantasy has become a key term in social contestations of the emerging medium. At issue is whose fantasies are catered to, who feels powerful and gets their way, and who is left out.
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In November 2023, Damani Phillips (School of Music and African American Studies) and spoken-word artist Brandon Alexander Williams released the world's first "listening book," Read and Blew Notes. A new medium intended to replace physical music products like CDs and download cards, the "L.B." brings back the ritual experience of listening to new music with a physical product in hand. The book includes album liner notes, full musical scores, and interviews with artists on how their music came into being.
Katie Buehner, Director of the UI Rita Benton Music Library, recently interviewed Dr. Phillips about the book. "We tried to make listening an experience as best as humanly possible," says Phillips. "Not just for a specific demographic or constituency, but for everyone! We tried to put something in the book that pretty much everybody can relate to. If you know nothing about music, then get into the interviews. If you're a music buff, then dive into the scores."
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When Tara Bynum, UI assistant professor of English and African American Studies, published her first book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America, she was able to share her words with an even larger audience than she could have imagined: She was interviewed by PBS in February and was featured on an April episode of The Takeaway podcast, hosted by Melissa Harris-Perry. “What I wrote is an academic book,” Bynum says. “It is not a work of creative writing. I think coming up through higher education, an academic book or literary criticism is not necessarily a genre that gets a lot of press. It’s very niche and written for literary critics. Having a book that is, on one hand, traditionally literary criticism find its way into popular culture, even briefly, is phenomenal.”
Bynum is one of the many UI faculty members who share their work broadly with the media and the public each year in a variety of mediums.
For any faculty thinking about speaking to the media or public for the first time, or anyone who wants to improve those skills, the UI has plenty of helpful resources.
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The Obermann Center is honored to be a member of the UIUC Mellon-funded consortium, Humanities Without Walls. The HWW Career Diversity Summer Workshop, held annually from 2015 to 2023, was a multi-week, interactive experience for PhD students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who were interested in exploring careers beyond the tenure track. Several students from the UI were selected over the years of the grant for this prestigious the workshop. | |
