Obermann Humanities Symposium
Previous Symposia

2008-2009 Symposia will be "Platforms for Public Scholars: Humanities in Public Life" October 15 - October 17, 2009. Directed by Teresa Mangum.

2007-2008 From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances
Directed by Bridget Harris Tsemo and Vershawn Ashanti Young. The Boojie symposium brought together scholars to discuss contemporary displays, notions and representations of black middle class performance within the humanities and American culture at large.

2006-2007 Obscenity: An Interdisciplinary Discussion
Directed by Loren Glass, English. The obscenity symposium sought to analyse the nororiously vague yet apparently perennial concept in an historical and global context.

2005-2006 Whitman Making Books / Books Making Whitman
Directed by Ed Folsom, English. This symposium was the first ever to address Whitman as a bookmaker. Trained as a printer while in his early teens, Whitman developed his printing skills while working as a typesetter on numerous New York area newspapers. As an editor of several newspapers, Whitman honed his layout skills and carried that knowledge and interest into his bookmaking when he designed his the first edition of Leaves of Grass , the first few pages of which he set into type while overseeing the project at the small printing establishment of his friend Andrew Rome. This first edition set the pattern for all of his subsequent books, with each of which he was intimately involved in choosing typeface, paper size, binding design, and layout. Even when his work was published by commercial presses, Whitman sat down with the typesetters to oversee the production. The symposium was accompanied by a major exhibition at The University of Iowa Museum of Artcurated by David Schoonover.

2004-2005 Collage As Cultural Practice
Co-Directors Kembrew McLeod, Communication Studies and Rudolf Kuenzli, English. Collage has become a creative outlet for oppositional commentary across the cultural spectrum. The UI symposium explored collage in literature, music, film, art, and online as well its place in discussions of race, gender, and politics. Symposium organizers note that collage takes many forms, from the leftist collages of the Dadaists and the Situationists to the unauthorized use of corporate trademarks and the more recent flurry of Internet-distributed antiwar video collage pieces that appropriate from the mainstream media in satirical ways.

2003-2004 Feminism and Film History
Co-Directors Lauren Rabinovits, American Studies and Cinema and Kathleen Newman, Spanish and Cinema. Today, feminist scholarship that synthesizes history and critical theory stands poised to have an equally dramatic impact on the fields of literature, history and the visual arts. Topics for discussion included the histories of women and performance, the ways that popular culture and consumer societies have addressed sexuality and gender, art as a political weapon, and, of course, the history of feminism itself. The conference also included a screening of the new documentary, "In The Mirror Of Maya Deren," (2002) by Martina Kudlacek, with an introduction by Alison Latendresse, a UI doctoral candidate in cinema and comparative literature.

2002-2003 The Cultured Body: African Fashion and Body Arts
Co-Directors Victoria Rovine, UI Museum of Art and Sarah Adams, School of Art and Art History. The goal of this gathering was to bring together an unprecedented array of scholarship concerning all aspects of African body arts, including traditional as well as contemporary forms and representing much of sub-Saharan Africa.

2000-2001 “Fleeting Objects, Enduring Communities:  New Work in the Study of Material Culture”
Co-Directors: Rudi Colleredo-Mansfeld, Anthropology and Mark Peterson, History. Beginning in the Spring 1999 semester, the Material Culture Workshop, a group of University of Iowa faculty and staff members, representing History, Anthropology, English, American Studies, Native American Studies, the School of Art and Art History, the Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History, met on a biweekly basis to present their ongoing works-in-progress on themes related to material culture. An outgrowth of this initial set of meetings was an emerging sense among all the participants that material culture studies, despite their tremendous growth in the past two decades, have failed to treat adequately some of the prominent aspects of the lives of material objects and some of the most critical questions surrounding them. Our collective work immediately suggested that issues surrounding ethics, morality, religion, and spirituality have been poorly handled by current approaches to material culture, which tend to rely on narratives of "secularization" or "modernization" to explain what happens to the meanings of objects that become commodities. But in a more general sense, our group has been troubled by still unanswered questions: Why objects? Why have humanities scholars turned their collective attention to “things?” And why now? What are some of the current conditions, within scholarly communities and in the world at large, that prompt the surge of interest in material culture? What values are at stake in the way we understand the role of material objects in the construction of culture? These continue to be some of the concerns that animate our group’s ongoing efforts to foster interdisciplinary research and conversation in material culture studies.

1999-2000 “Planning as Storytelling:  Sustaining America’s Cities”
Co-Directors:  Barbara Eckstein and James Throgmorton
Our primary goal was to insert storytelling into the consciousness of all those present who do urban work.  The vitality and quality of our invited speakers—some talking of hands-on experience and others more theoretically—engaged everyone in the challenge of defining storytelling and urban sustainability.