Taft Distinguished Professors
The Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professorship is one of the highest honors available to faculty at the University of Cincinnati. The program is designed to reward our most outstanding faculty with a title and dedicated research line, affording monies to conduct and share research. The Distinguished Professorships are awarded based on scholarly distinction. Faculty with a strong reputation for outstanding scholarly and/or creative work, particularly scholarly work done in the recent past expected to continue into the future, will be most competitive. This honor is open to all Taft-eligible tenured (associate or full) faculty.
The award provides a title for a five-year period and $4,000 annually in research funds, for a total of $20,000 over the five-year period of the professorship. Each annual $4,000 allotment must be spent during the same fiscal year as the award granted unless prior approval from the Taft Director. Taft Distinguished Professors are expected to deliver an inaugural lecture/presentation to the UC community, serve on review committees during the five-year professorship, and participate Taft activities, as relevant.
Applications are now open for the 2025–2030 Taft Distinguished Professorships.
Current Taft Distinguished Professors
Dr. Sharrell D. Luckett is a 2023–2028 Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of Drama and Performance Studies and the Director of the Helen Weinberger Center for Drama & Playwriting. You can learn more about her dynamic career at www.sdluckett.com and www.BlackActingMethods.com.
Dr. Shailaja D. Paik is a 2023–2028 Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor of History and Affiliate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies. Her research, writing, and teaching interests lie at the intersection of a number of fields: Modern South Asia; Dalit studies; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; social and political movements; oral history; human rights and humanitarianism. As a historian, she specializes in the social, intellectual, and cultural history of Modern India. Her first book Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014 ) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022 analyzes the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. The book won the American Historical Association's 2023 John F. Richards Prize for "the most distinguished work of scholarship on South Asia" and the Association of Asian Studies 2024 Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize. She is working on several new book projects: Becoming "Vulgar": Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India, Caste, Race, and Indigeneity in and beyond South Asia, and the Cambridge Companion to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. Her research is funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale University, Emory University, the Ford Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, among others. She directs the "Ambedkar-King Justice Initiative" at the University of Cincinnati and was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.
Dr. Magda Peligrad is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, whose area of expertise is Probability Theory. Her research deals with dependent structures and covers various aspects of modeling dependence, maximal inequalities and limit theorems. Some of her results have immediate applicability to Statistics of dependent data, Nonparametric statistics and Ergodic theory, making her field of research interdisciplinary. The results of her research are the subject of over 100 papers and chapters in various books, and were presented in a large number of lectures and talks at meetings, in the United States and abroad. Her research was rewarded by numerous National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, and Taft research center grants. In 1995 she became an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; in 2003 she received the title of distinguished Taft Professor. In 2010 her contributions to Probability theory were recognized in a meeting held in her honor in Paris, France. In 2017 she became a graduate fellow of the University of Cincinnati. Magda Peligrad serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. She is also serving on the Committee of Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She was a doctoral adviser for eight Ph.D. students and hosted two postdocs.
N.B. In late 2022 this program was changed from a previous model that allowed faculty to hold the Taft Distinguished Professorships until retirement. Then, as now, awards were based on scholarly distinction.