Taft Research Seminar
Taft Research Seminars are designed for advanced undergraduates and early graduate students interested in reading, thinking, and working collaboratively across the humanities and social sciences. Seminars are organized around interdisciplinary themes, with readings from multiple disciplinary perspectives and related thematic programming at the Taft Research Center. Discussions in the first half of the seminar are geared toward dissecting methods, theories, and approaches across and beyond the involved units, encouraging students to critically reflect on their own disciplinary training and planned research trajectory. Activities in the second half of the seminar support students in designing collaborative, public-facing interdisciplinary research projects related to the seminar. Seminars are listed under HUM/SOSC 4010 and HUM/SOSC 7010 for 3 credit hours, and have the following student learning outcomes:
- Appraise how disciplinary boundaries, genres, and conventions in the humanities and social sciences shape scholars’ research questions, the knowledge they produce, and how they collaborate with others beyond their discipline.
- Analyze and articulate how their own disciplinary training has shaped their research interests and planned trajectory.
- Develop interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research questions that draw on multiple humanities and social science fields, theories, and methods.
- Design collaborative, public-facing interdisciplinary research projects.
- Devise plans for integrating interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches in their thesis and dissertation research projects. (Graduate students only)
We are seeking proposals for new, team-taught Taft Research Seminars to be offered spring 2026 related to the 2025/26 Center theme Period. Each member of the faculty teaching team should come from a different unit (one must be a Taft unit, the other may be outside the college) and have a different disciplinary training. Both should have expertise on the proposed topic.
This program will provide $15,000 to incentivize and support the collaborative research, teaching, and public outputs for the new course and its development. Up to $5,000 per unit may be utilized to allow faculty to co-teach the seminar as part of their regular workload. These unit-allocated funds may not be used for capital expenses or general operating expenses. The remaining funds must be utilized for material costs and associated programming, e.g., honoraria or funding community partner participation.
Applications should be submitted through the Taft portal, and must include the following:
- Abbreviated (two-page) curriculum vitae of each proposed faculty leading the seminar;
- Seminar name and description;
- A narrative on the co-designed seminar and how it relates to the 2025/26 theme;
- A brief discussion of methods and theories to be discussed in the first half of the seminar;
- Proposed activities for the second half of the seminar;
- Anticipated outcomes of the seminar;
- Letter from each faculty member’s unit head affirming that if they are selected, the faculty member will be allowed to teach the co-taught course as part of their teaching obligations for spring 2026.
Applications are due by April 28, 2025, at 5pm
Faculty Research Support
Faculty Research Support applications are due by 5pm on the day of each deadline: Sept. 23, Jan. 27, Mar. 24
Taft offers research support to faculty working on individual research projects, with a priority given to those that have or will seek external funding. Applications may include but are not limited to direct research or research collaboration costs and cost-share grants. The maximum Research Support Grant is $10,000, though most grants are $5,000 or less. Unlike Travel for Research, this program is not meant to support a faculty members research travel.