2024–27 PUBLIC HUMANITIES

Dr. Chandra Frank is a scholar–curator and assistant professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on feminist and queer of color movement work, possibilities of dissent, and the ways in which race and the environment work as terrains of power. She has worked closely with artists and art institutions to curate exhibitions and public activations, with archivists and activists to highlight forgotten public histories, and with gardeners and farmers to bring ecological to think about our connections to land and soil. During her tenure she will develop projects and partnerships related to ecologies, public memory and walking methodologies, with the goal of establishing a small public arts festival in Cincinnati. Learn more here. 

2023–28 DISTINGUISHED

Dr. Sharrell D. Luckett is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies and Director of the Helen Weinberger Center for Drama & Playwriting. Her research and practice interests include Directing, Acting Theory & Methodologies, Black Theatre, Fat Studies, Performance Studies, Autoethnography, Black Feminist Theory, and Playwriting. Dr. Luckett is an award-winning theatre director, best-selling author, and arts administrator whose publications include YoungGiftedandFat: An Autoethnography of Size, Sexuality, and Privilege, Routledge (2018), Transweight: Poems from an Undercover Fat Girl, (2014). In her current project, The Luckett Paradigm, she develops a performance methodology where practice and theory are guided by four overlapping, intersecting Afrocentric dimensions: Core-Creation, Orientation, Dialogic Devising, and Resuscitation. The Paradigm involves empowered authorship, musical sensibilities, spirituality, activism, ensemble building, reverence of Black culture, and creation without a script. Learn more here.  

2025–30 DISTINGUISHED

Dr. Heidi Maibom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of the Basque Country. Dr. Maibom’s research interests include interpersonal understanding and empathy, along with shame, responsibility, and psychopathy; she teaches contemporary philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science, as well as the philosophy of emotions, identity, and religion. Among other honors, she previously served as the president of President of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE).

2023–28 DISTINGUISHED

Dr. Shailaja D. Paik is Professor of History and Affiliate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies. Her research, writing, and teaching interests lie at the intersection of a number of fields: Modern South Asia; Dalit studies; women's, gender, and sexuality studies; social and political movements; oral history; human rights and humanitarianism. As a historian, Dr. Paik specializes in the social, intellectual, and cultural history of Modern India. Her first book Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014 ) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford University Press, 2022  analyzes the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra.  She directs the "Ambedkar-King Justice Initiative" at the University of Cincinnati and was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Learn more here.

DISTINGUISHED

Dr. Magda Peligrad is a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, whose area of expertise is Probability Theory. Her research deals with dependent structures and covers various aspects of modeling dependence, maximal inequalities and limit theorems. Some of her results have immediate applicability to Statistics of dependent data, Nonparametric statistics and  Ergodic theory, making her field of research interdisciplinary. The results of her research are the subject of over 100 papers and chapters in various books, and were presented in a large number of lectures and talks at meetings, in the United States and abroad. Her research was rewarded by numerous National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, and Taft research center grants.  In 1995 she became an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics; in 2003 she received the title of distinguished Taft Professor. In 2010 her contributions to Probability theory were recognized in a meeting held in her honor in Paris, France. In 2017  she became a graduate fellow of the University of Cincinnati. Magda Peligrad serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. She is also serving on the Committee of Fellows of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She was a doctoral adviser for eight Ph.D. students and hosted two postdocs.

SOCIAL JUSTICE 2025–27

Dr. Anne Delano Steinert studies public history and the history of the built environment with a focus on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Cincinnati. She directs the Center for the City and is the founder of Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine Museum. Dr. Steinert will advance work on several collaborative, social justice projects during her professorship, including researching the impacts of institutional truth telling on recruitment, retention, and rootedness of Black students and faculty with the Universities Studying Slavery coalition; pursuing funding and institutional support for a just and fitting campus monument for victims of the UC full-body radiation experiments with colleagues in the College of Medicine; creating physical markers for the “UC Black History Trail” created with her students alongside colleagues in DAAP; and researching and building a digital Avondale History Trail with community historians. Learn more here.

DISTINGUISHED

The Taft Distinguished Professorship is one of the highest honors available to faculty at the University of Cincinnati. Designed to reward our most outstanding faculty with a title and dedicated research line, affording monies to conduct and share research, this professorship is awarded based on scholarly distinction. Faculty with a strong reputation for outstanding scholarly and/or creative work, particularly in the recent past expected to continue in the future, will be most competitive. This honor is open to all Taft-eligible tenured faculty at the associate or professor level. The award provides a title for a five-year period and $5,000 annually in research funds, for a total of $25,000 over the five-year period of the professorship. Taft Distinguished Professors are expected to deliver an inaugural lecture/presentation to the UC community, serve on Taft review committees, and participate in Center activities. 

PUBLIC HUMANITIES

Taft Professorship of Public Humanities is a three-year professorship that recognizes outstanding UC faculty with exemplary records of socially- and/or community-engaged humanistic inquiry who have demonstrated experience in public-facing, humanistic scholarship and are prepared to speak in accessible ways to a variety of audiences, both within and outside academia. Taft eligible faculty at all ranks are encouraged to apply, including advanced assistant, associate, and full professors. In addition to the title, the award provides $4,000 in funding each year to the recipient, to support their research, creative projects, and professional development, as well as $5,000 per year to their home unit to support one course release. The Taft Professor of Public Humanities is expected to provide an annual lecture/event to the UC community, serve on the Taft Director’s advising committee, and participate in Center activities.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Taft Professorship of Social Justice is a three-year professorship that recognizes outstanding UC faculty with exemplary records of socially- and/or community-engaged social scientific inquiry who have demonstrated experience in public-facing, social justice scholarship and are prepared to speak in accessible ways to a variety of audiences, both within and outside academia. Taft eligible faculty at all ranks are encouraged to apply, including advanced assistant, associate, and full professors. In addition to the title, the award provides $4,000 in funding each year to the recipient, to support their research, creative projects, and professional development, as well as $5,000 per year to their home unit to support one course release. The Taft Professor of Public Humanities is expected to provide an annual lecture/event to the UC community, serve on the Taft Director’s advising committee, and participate in Center activities.