Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America Join us for virtual discussion with Tara Bynum and Kabria Baumgartner

On Thursday, March 2, at 2:30 p.m. CST, Professors Tara Bynum (English, CLAS) and Kabria Baumgartner (History and Africana Studies, Northeastern University) will discuss 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.

Bynum, a 2021 recipient of the Book Ends: Obermann/OVPR Book Completion Workshop award, says that she and Baumgartner will discuss "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 eighteenth-century pleasures mean for us at present."

Free and open to all, but registration is required.

Note: The OVPR and Prairie Lights are hosting an in-person reading and book signing for Professor Bynum on March 22. Details here.

FACULTY: $15K Summer Humanities Labs Funding Available

Apply by 3/7 and secure $10K for your department!

When you transform your graduate seminar into a Humanities Lab, you'll give students the opportunity to engage in collaborative, public-facing projects that contribute to the public good, foster a socially just approach to equity and inclusion in work practices and workplaces, and equip students with crucial skills for various careers while also adding an exciting new experiential offering to your department’s graduate offerings (without disrupting the existing curriculum). The $15K supports a summer team you put together which can include faculty, graduate students, staff, and community partners who help you to plan this new kind of course. To honor your department’s support for experimentation, we also provide $10K in supporting funds to your department.

Awards & Accomplishments

• Grazyna Kochanska (Spelman-Rockefeller Child Research Grants) was named a 2022 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general-scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.
• Claire Frances (Anne Frank Tree Planting and HPG Humanities Labs) and Johna Leddy ('19 Fellow-in-Residence) won Innovations in Teaching with Technology Awards.
• Bree Rubel (HPG ICRU) was selected for the Kristen K. Lippke Memorial Scholarship in GWSS.
• Hyaeweol Choi (Former Advisory Board), Stanley Family and Korea Foundation Chair in Korean Studies and Chair of GWSS, was elected into a leadership role for the premier global organization in Asian Studies.
• Colin Gordon (History) and Ashley Howard (African American Studies and History) were awarded $400,000 by the Mellon Foundation for their project "Dividing the City: Race Restrictions and the Architecture of Segregation in the Midwest." Their project examines white reactions to Black migration in Iowa, focusing on the use of race-based property restrictions in the state’s metropolitan counties, resistance to these practices, and the implications for racial equity today.

Featured Video:

A Crisis of Care: Iowa's Childcare Predicament

An Obermann Conversation

Quality childcare is an elemental need. It allows parents to work at paid jobs, which in turn helps to support the economic well-being of our communities. Equally as crucial, it provides early childhood development for the next generation.

Anyone who has tried to find quality childcare, however, knows that it is not easy to find—or very affordable. In the past five years, Iowa has lost more than a third of its childcare providers, and the cost of child care amounts to 15.3% of the average Iowa family's household income.

In this conversation from November 2022, we paired then workforce development lobbyist Jennifer Banta and now President and CEO of our local United Way with feminist philosopher Asha Bhandary. Banta is part of a cadre working across sectors to address Iowa’s childcare crisis, while Bhandary’s current research addresses the injustices baked into caregiving arrangements—for both the givers and receivers of care.

Funded Summer Internships Available via Humanities for the Public Good

Apply by March 9

For the fifth and last summer of the Mellon Foundation–funded Humanities for the Public Good internships, the Obermann Center and Graduate College are offering internships at eight local sites in Summer 2023: the Coralville Community Food Pantry, the Coralville Public Library, the Diversity Market, the Iowa City Public Library Friends Foundation, Public Space One, UI Labor Center, UI Office of the State Archaeologist, and the United Way of Johnson and Washington Counties.

Interns will receive $5,000 for eight weeks of research and writing work. PhD students in the humanities should apply by March 9!

Frequências Symposium a Historical Gathering of Brazilian Filmmakers and Scholars on the UI Campus

Join us March 30–April 1

The 2022-23 Obermann Humanities Symposium and International Programs Major Projects Award, Frequências: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Cinema & the Black Diaspora, will feature the emerging wave of young Afro-Brazilian filmmakers, curators, programmers, and scholars whose art and scholarship have already had an impact on international cinema. 

“Often in the United States, whenever the subject of diaspora comes up, it seems as if it’s very U.S.-centric; it’s about Black Americans,” said Christopher Harris (Cinematic Arts, CLAS), who is co-directing the symposium along with Janaína Oliveira (Federal Instituto of Rio de Janeiro) and Chris Lira (University of Georgia). “In a way, it often erases the rest of the global south in this hemisphere and is reduced to a bilateral discussion between Black people in the U.S. and the continent of Africa. I really wanted to center Brazil to bring forward another part of the diaspora that wasn’t confined to a bilateral discussion of the U.S. and Africa.” 

“There are many crossroads in the world—global politics, migration, etc.—that speak to this Frequências symposium,” said Oliveira. “I’ve been making programs featuring Black women filmmakers for a while and when it comes to the films they are making about their diasporic experiences, they’re really framing new cinematic ways of talking about the diaspora.”

Through panel discussions, interventions, film screenings, and artists’ performances, the Frequências symposium aims to incite, inspire, and engage the audience to join the organizers and participants—both scholars and filmmakers—in an act of creativity and imagination in response to the films, performances and theorizations of Afro-Brazilian film, history, and culture.

Full article by Daniel Vorwerk, International Programs

Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts an Offspring of Archives Humanities Lab

U of Chicago, March 2–4

Symposium tickets are now available for the 2023 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, co-organized by Hayley O'Malley, who recently transformed one of her graduate seminars into the Humanities Lab “Creating with Archives," along with Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder. This symposium is one of the resulting collaborations!

Drawing inspiration from the 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts—likely the first Black women's film festival—the 2023 symposium will celebrate the rich tradition of Black women's filmmaking with screenings, roundtable discussions, poetry readings, special tributes, and more. Over fifty filmmakers, writers, curators, and critics are set to participate, including the University of Iowa's own Tracie Morris. 

The events will be held at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago and will also be livestreamed. Admission is free, but in-person seating is limited, so if you want to attend in person, reserve your ticket today!