Right now, you’ll spot the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies as a striking stone-and-timber Tudor Revival house with steep, triangular roof peaks and dark wooden trim-just look for the historic building tucked among trees next to the big black sign that reads ‘111 Church Street.’
Let’s imagine it’s 1978: bell-bottoms, disco music, and a new kind of research dream is brewing at the University of Iowa. It all started thanks to a pioneering spirit-C. Esco Obermann, who must’ve loved ideas so much that he and his wife Avalon helped put their family name on Iowa’s future of curiosity. At first, this center wasn't even in this charming house! It was over in Oakdale Hall-so if these walls seem like they’ve just settled in, they have… since 2011, to be exact, after Oakdale Hall was demolished.
The Obermann Center isn’t the type to sit still. Over the decades, it’s transformed from “University House” to “Center for Advanced Studies” to today’s honored mouthful-the C. Esco and Avalon L. Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. That's what happens when your sponsors have both generosity and a knack for naming things that sound impressive at dinner parties. Just picture the students and professors bustling through these doors, from fresh-eyed undergraduates to well-seasoned scholars with more books than houseplants!
But this isn’t just a place for quiet tea-drinking and theory-nope! The Obermann Center throws the doors wide open for everything from raucous annual symposiums, where debates spark about everything from Afro-Brazilian cinema to the latest tug-of-war over book bans, to a summer residency where you can hear the frantic, hopeful scribbles of writers on deadline.
The Center is equal parts laboratory, stage, and secret writer’s hideout. It even hosts international fellowships for creative minds from halfway across the globe, and a writing retreat where, at least once a year, stressed-out researchers find that magic “silent room” and the comforting aroma of catered lunch (not to mention the sense of victory over their word counts).
So whether it’s a panel on labor strikes or a book completion workshop called “Book Ends,” the Obermann Center turns bright ideas into world-changing projects. With famous scholars like historian John Durham Peters and legal legend Herbert Hovenkamp having passed through here, you never know which brainwave might be the next big breakthrough-or the next topic for a fiercely caffeinated Obermann Conversation.
Take a look at this storybook building, and remember: inside, ideas don’t just float-they march, debate, and every so often, take a well-deserved coffee break!
