Join us as we read works about weather and of weather. What is the weather? Why is the weather? Drawing on inheritances and scholarship in the interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, this reading group invites folks to navigate weathers with us—critical geographies, anthropogenic becomings, the waters of the abyss, matters of air, the animacy of water, literary and historic stories of ocean and time, heat, speculation, repair, and abolition. 

To join, please email Harshavardhan Bhat at bhathn@ucmail.uc.edu or Megan Gette at gettemj@ucmail.uc.edu. 

While UC has no Department of Religious Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences includes faculty from a variety of disciplines who study religion. These faculty teach courses in the Religious Studies or Biblical Studies certificate programs but otherwise have few opportunities to engage as scholars on topics of mutual interest.

The Religious Studies Reading Group creates an interdisciplinary forum for conversations and collaborative projects pertinent to all of us working at UC within or even at the margins of the field. Rather than replicating (in an ersatz way) a traditional religious studies program, with its specialists in distinct religious traditions, the Religious Studies Reading Group operates as a kind of lab for the study of significant issues that in one way or another touch upon religious histories, texts, traditions, cultures, and communities. 

If you have any questions about this group or would like to join, please contact Jenny Caplan, at caplanjr@ucmail.uc.edu

 

Knowledge of the pre-modern past offers stimulating ways of understanding how cultural ideas and traditions are constructed by and disseminated among different agents and regions, helping us contextualize contemporary debates about identity, community, politics, culture, and the humanities. The Taft Reading Group Global Pre-modern Studies (ca. 600 –1700) encourages multidisciplinary scholarship that reflects the rich array of areas of study offered at UC, including medieval and early modern religious traditions, cross-cultural trade and exchange, science and technology, literary and cultural studies, gender and race studies, political and legal structures, and material and visual cultures.

This group aims to create a diverse community of colleagues—current and emeritus faculty, graduate students, and staff from various departments and colleges as well as scholars and curators in the greater Cincinnati area—to exchange ideas, share work-in-progress, participate in research roundtables, and foster collaboration in research, teaching, and public engagement.

Joanna Huh, Assistant Professor of English, A&S and Christopher Platts, Assistant Professor of Art History, DAAP serve as co-organizers of this group. 

For more information or to join this reading group, please contact Susan Longfield Karr, at karrsn@ucmail.uc.edu

This group provides a learning community to faculty and graduate students who teach or are interesting in forms of pedagogy, to deconstruct and address issues of power and privilege in pedagogical endeavors and to invite a stronger and more detailed understanding of what it means to invite critical, culturally sustaining – responsive, and inclusive writing practices in all disciplines.

This group is open to graduate students and faculty across disciplines.

For more information on this group, or to join, please contact Alecia Beymer, at  beymeraa@ucmail.uc.edu

The Critical Theory Reading Group invites an informal approach to engaging with and reading critical theory across discipline areas. The group would meet biweekly and is open to graduate students and faculty. In our meetings, we discuss a text and work to demystify the art of crafting and interpreting theory. The discussion would center on past and contemporary forms of critical theory alongside our own work.

For more information on this group, or to join, please contact Alecia Beymer, at beymeraa@ucmail.uc.edu

Statistics provides powerful tools to all the areas that need data analysis and decision making. This group works to promote communications on data analysis and statistical modeling to advance our research community and build productive collaborations across fields. Studying the impact of Bayesian modeling methods, which enable a natural
combination of the field knowledge with the statistical models, this group seeks to understand the real impact of the statistical methods on solving real-world problems.

For more information on the group, or to join, please contact Xia Wang, Department of Mathematical Sciences, at wang2x7@ucmail.uc.edu.

This reading group, largely comprised of SPIA and WGSS faculty and graduate students but open to any other faculty and graduate students interested in the topic, is dedicated to reading and discussing cutting-edge works in the fields of feminist international politics and transnational feminisms to enliven our collective thinking and feeling about global politics otherwise beyond the classroom. It began in Spring 2024 with a focus on scholarly and public intellectual works representative of affective, narrative, visual, and autoethnographic turns in the study of global politics which seek to fundamentally disturb how global politics is understood and counter those violence-producing understandings. This group constitutes critical restorative work for graduate students and faculty who continuously confront violence in the world and in disciplinary knowledge in their scholarship and activism, but it also enables new ways of studying and writing about global politics to reimagine it otherwise. It meets three times per semester to discuss collectively chosen works and has led to the additional creation of the Reimagining Global Politics, Re-envisioning Humanity Taft Research Group which shifts from collective reading to collective writing through workshops, symposia, and group meetings.
 
For more information or to join, please contact Lilly Pace at paceln@mail.uc.edu and Anne Sisson Runyan at runyanas@ucmail.uc.edu.