Welcome!
The Charles Phelps Taft Research Center is 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. We offer a range of university and public humanities programs that bring people together. We provide fellowships and awards to faculty and students conducting original research as well as to our 15 member units to enrich their students' experiences.
Our theme for the 2026–27 academic year is Counter. Join us for lectures, workshops, and events that foreground counterintuitive insights from the humanities and social sciences! Centering questions of quantification, representation, opposition, and exchange, we will explore a range of methods and topics that reveal the shape of systems, desires, and connections. We will go over and under the counter, tracing the seams between licit and illicit commerce, regulation and irregular activities. We will foreground counter as a position, a way of opposing, offsetting, or correcting an institution, point, or practice to ask: Given what we are up against, what kind of accounting does the current moment demand? From counterprotests and counterinsurgencies to countermeasures, counterfactuals, and counterattacks, how might we knit together creative, critical, and speculative approaches that bridge qualitative and quantitative methods to positively reshape and reimagine our world? How can we ensure the humanities and social sciences count?