Faculty Members—Join us in learning how to support graduate students seeking diverse careers!

Preparing Faculty – Our original planning committee (Professor Teresa Mangum, CLAS Associate Deans Roland Racevskis and Christine Grant, and Assistant Director Brady Krien, Graduate College, led by Professor Ken Brown from the College of Business) attended an HWW training. Joined by Assistant Vice President for Research Kristy Nabhan-Warren, they then met with business and nonprofit leaders in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids to learn about their needs and their interest in hiring humanities MA and PHD graduates. Inspired by their conversations, Obermann Faculty Fellow Naomi Greyser and Obermann Assistant Director Lauren Cox worked with the team to design a rehearsal for faculty and graduate students interested in connecting with public partners this past September (pictured here). 

Connecting with Public Partners – We jump from rehearsal to real networking on December 12 from 3:30-5:00! We will soon be inviting faculty members and interested graduate students to participate in a special event featuring leaders in business and the nonprofit sector. Together, we’ll consider what skills already being taught (though not always named) in graduate classes can open career doors for students. It’s an exciting opportunity to learn and see, as our team has, how highly public sector employers value humanities skills, mindsets, and capacities. Watch this newsletter for more details, but if you know you’d like to participate, please contact our RA Andrew Parayil Boge at [email protected].

Before the HPG graduate certificate is launched soon, here are a few courses to consider taking with a strong applied humanities dimension!

CLAS:6290 Media Training for Humanities Scholars

Instructor: Paul Dilley

Monday and Wednesday, 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm, 1015A LIB

The humanities are comprised of multiple disciplines each requiring years of specialized training. Unfortunately, among the many research methodologies taught to graduate students, dealing with the popular media hasn’t traditionally been among them. And yet, speaking to the media, from newspaper reporters, to television interviews, to appearing on documentaries as experts, is an increasingly important part of scholarship, both for communicating one’s research to the world, to fundraising to getting a job. And that's if you find a job in the academy. The professional skills you’ll learn in this class will help you all the more if you look for a job outside of teaching for a university.

The ability to write clearly and to speak to the public effectively are increasingly important in our media-driven world. This course teaches students how to “do” publicly-engaged scholarship effectively. The course will introduce students to the concept of public scholarship in general, providing a behind-the-scenes glance into a side of the academy that most successful professional scholars have learned to master when promoting their research.

ENGL:6090 Creating With Archives

Instructor: Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

Thursday, 12:30 pm - 3:00 pm, 212 EPB

This seminar will be one of the first Humanities Lab’s at the University of Iowa, a project in partnership with Humanities for the Public Good and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Humanities Labs foreground issues of equity and inclusion with a community partner and are grounded in collaborative, project-based, experiential pedagogy. Our community partner will be the LGBTQ Iowa Archives and Library (LIAL) in Iowa City, a community archives and lending library with a mission to collect, preserve, and share the queer history of Iowa and increase access to queer literature for all ages. Together with LIAL, you will engage in the study and practice of archiving, learning tools in digitization, preservation, and exhibition, alongside emerging philosophical discussions about the role of archives in communities rather than institutions. As we read texts in queer and archival theory, community archiving practices, and ethical community engagement, we will ask: who controls the preservation of history and literature? And then, what do community efforts at preserving and telling one’s own stories look like in practice? We will work with LIAL and others to put on a public-facing festival based on creative approaches to archival research, that decenters scholarly productivity. Rather than the traditional seminar paper, students will be expected to jump in and learn the skills that will benefit our community partner and join in with them as creators, organizers, and thinkers.

AMST:6500 Readings in Cultural Studies - Stuart Hall

Instructor: Deborah Whaley

Wednesday, 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm, 213 EPB

Our course will explore the scholarship of sociologist, activist, and theorist Stuart Hall. In so doing, we will also examine the theories, methods, and history of cultural studies. The course focuses on the major areas of Hall’s work: Marxist thought and the political economy, diasporas and globalization, cultural production and popular culture, film and cinema studies, race, ethnicity, identity, and differánce. It will also cover key theorists that influenced Stuart Hall (e.g., Marx, Foucault, Fanon, Gramsci, and Althusser) and scholars in cultural studies that have made use of Hall’s writings and theories in their own work. Finally, we will consider the role of theory in everyday life and the critical role of public intellectuals. Our course requires a digital portfolio that will consist of writing an Op-Ed for an online journal, a 3 1/2 minute digital story regarding your academic/professional/activist interests in cultural studies, and a 20 minute co-facilitation of one class session. This course is cross-listed with the African American Studies Program and counts toward the graduate certificate in African American Studies and the graduate certificate in Public Digital Humanities.

Ft. Obermann Director and HPG PI, Teresa Mangum

In the beginning, Humanities Without Walls (HWW) was an untested idea. An experiment. In 2012, Dianne Harris, then-director of the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH), led a planning effort that included humanities center directors from the University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. IPRH had been awarded a $100,000 officer’s grant from the Mellon Foundation, and the committee aimed to create opportunities for multi-campus collaboration and opportunities for public engagement in the humanities.

“It was impressive that Dianne managed those early conversations in ways that shifted attention to publicly engaged practice, to thinking more about grad students,” said Teresa Mangum, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumna who received her PhD in English in 1990, and is the director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. The balance between public and private universities among consortium institutions was also distinctive. “Democracy isn't achieved by pretending people who have power don't have it.”