A period can be a point, a dot, a break, a marked yet invisible tool of control that naturalizes power and its perspective. It also can be a fleshy, natural thing—something abundant and excessive, often stigmatized and obscured. A period can be shorthand for the experience of time and history, condensing the fullness of life into a terse description that highlights key relations. A period can signal duration, contrast, and repetition.
The 2025/26 Taft Research Center theme Period. invites us to think about time, perspective, punctuation, rhythm, and speed. While periods can signal the end of something—a definitive statement, break, full stop, end of discussion—they also suggest cycles, intervals, and return. Grammatically, periods pace our writing, translating speech into written forms. When a period is multiplied, gathered, and evenly spaced, it becomes an ellipsis. Ellipses can suggest pause and reflection, trailing off to allow one to privately think, rest, and regroup, or they can sharpen a writer’s point, eliding words and context, encouraging readers to move more quickly through a text, much like periods in abbreviations.
With the 2025/26 theme Period. we will explore how humanities and social science scholars punctuate time, history, and our ideas for audiences within and beyond the academy. What is the point of humanities and social science research? What do we include and what do we leave out in our work and writing? In exploring both the public-facing and backstage of humanistic inquiry, we will examine how the humanities and social sciences connect us to the fleshy rhythms of life.