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The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies is proud to be a member of the Andrew W. Mellon funded Humanities Without Walls consortium. We will be supporting collaborative applications for teams led by one or more University of Iowa faculty members that might include teams of faculty, staff, community partners, and graduate students for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 academic years. Please read the information below, including the PDF below, if you are interested in applying. Then contact Obermann Director Teresa Mangum for more information (teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu). You can also find excellent resources, including a video series on this grant opportunity and how to write strong grants more generally, on the HWW website. 

In 2015, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded $3,000,000 to the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to fund an extensive consortium of sixteen humanities institutes in the Midwest and beyond. By leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses, the initiative, titled “Humanities Without Walls,” aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation. The grant was renewed for an additional two years and has now been renewed for a third and final round.

Preparing for the 2022-23 HWW Collaborative Grants

Humanities Without Walls Consortial Seed Grants—Applications will be accepted on a rolling deadline until September 6 and reviewed as received.

In collaboration with the Andrew W. Mellon-funded Humanities Without Walls project led by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Obermann Center is offering seed grants to support the development of applications for the third Grand Research Challenge. For the next two years, faculty-led teams can apply for up to $150,000 for collaborative projects dedicated to “interdisciplinary, collaborative, research-based projects in the humanities and arts that build a clearly communicated commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution into their project design and proposal narratives, regardless of the research topic or theme they focus on.” The topic is open and the teams can include faculty, staff, community partners, and colleagues from other colleges and universities, and must have a role for graduate students. Final applications are due November 15, 2021 for 2022-23 (with a second round due in November 2022 for 2023-24). The Obermann Center will provide up to two project leaders per team a $1,000 stipend to support developing and writing a grant application (a $500 initial award subject to the workflow processing time and $500 upon submission of the application) and will lead a workshop to help applicants write strong applications. To learn more, please carefully read the HWW website to be sure your project idea meets the grant requirements, then schedule an appointment with Obermann Director Teresa Mangum (teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu) before applying.

The emphasis in these final two rounds of the HWW grant (academics years 2022-23 and 2023-24) will be to build a commitment to methodologies of reciprocity and redistribution into their project design that is clearly communicated in their proposal narratives, regardless of the research topic or theme they focus on. The HRI has provided the Obermann Center with seed grant funding to help faculty members develop proposals. This funding can be used to support group members in holding a planning meeting. In the early fall semester, the Obermann Center will also organize a grant-writing "sprint" for groups that apply to ensure strong applications that meet the criteria and get submitted in a timely fashion.

Read the official RFP for Humanities Without Walls 2021 Grand Research Challenge Initiative.

Review this PDF detailing the HWW Grand Research Challenge, eligibility guidelines, application processes, and resources for developing a grant proposal

The grant, led by HRI Director and Principal Investigator Antoinette Burton, has funded two kinds of initiatives in the past. One initiative supports the development of summer workshops for pre-doctoral students in the humanities who intend to pursue careers outside the academy. A second initiative funds cross-institutional teams of faculty, staff, graduate students, and other partners pursuing research that focuses on a grand challenge. Past collaborations have produced performances, publications, exhibitions, digital projects, new courses and more. 

The consortium includes members of the Big 10 Alliance, Indiana University Bloomington, Marquette University (joined the consortium in 2020), Michigan State University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Penn State University, Purdue University, as well as the Universities of Chicago, Illinois at Chicago, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin-Madison—plus the University of Notre Dame. The humanities centers at the consortial institutions, including the Obermann Center, serve as the hubs for collaboration.  

The 21st century presents a clear and pressing need to collaboratively mobilize the collective resources of the heartland’s institutions of higher education. This consortium of humanities centers is advancing innovative and experimental research and pedagogical practices by sharing unevenly distributed resources across institutional walls and by testing new ideas at scale. Humanities centers can best undertake this work because they are already sites of innovation on university campuses, generating ideas and stimulating new knowledge on campuses through the creation and funding of major initiatives.

The Humanities Without Walls consortium is the first of its kind to experiment at this large scale with cross-institutional collaboration.

By leveraging the strengths of multiple distinctive campuses, the initiative, titled “Humanities Without Walls,” aims to create new avenues for collaborative research, teaching, and the production of scholarship in the humanities, forging and sustaining areas of inquiry that cannot be created or maintained without cross-institutional cooperation.