Research Seminars

Reimagined in 2025, 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 that encourage 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’s theme. Seminars are cross-listed under HUM/SOSC 4010 and HUM/SOSC 7010 for 3 credit hours. Taft Research Seminars are open to students across the university, not just from Taft units. 

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to: 

• 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) 

Spring 2025