Director's Welcome

Welcome to the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, an intellectually vibrant and nourishing hub for interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations that demonstrate the importance of the humanities and humanistic social sciences in understanding and positively reshaping our world. 

Taft Research Center offers a range of university and public humanities programs that bring people together across the 15 Taft-member departments, allied fields, community partners, and beyond. We offer a range of award and fellowship programs for Taft faculty such as the Center Fellows program and Taft research seminars, awards and fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students who are conducting original research, and funding for Taft departments to enrich their students’ experiences.

Our theme for the 2024–25 academic year is Worldbuilding and Radical Worldmaking. Throughout the year we will host a series of distinguished visiting lecturers, artists, and makers, as well as our own faculty scholars, to show how our fields' methods, practices, and ways of knowing can be used to envision alternative futures and advocate for social justice. Together with activists and practitioners, we will examine the horizons of radical worldmaking, and explore different techniques to anchor, imagine, and speculate about new worlds, while advocating for changes in our own. 

We hope you will join us!
 
Stephanie Sadre-Orafai 

Taft Research Center Director & Faculty Chair
Associate Professor of Anthropology 
College of Arts and Sciences
University of Cincinnati