Annual Theme
Each year Taft organizes a series of lectures, workshops, seminars, and other events connected to our annual theme. We select themes that are both timely and capacious, highlighting multiple perspectives and approaches to enduring humanistic questions.
Counter
Our 2026–27 theme foregrounds counterintuitive insights from the humanities and social sciences to ask: Given what the humanities and social sciences are up against, what kinds of accounting does the current moment demand? How can we ensure our knowledge and practices count?
Programming will center questions of quantification, representation, opposition, and exchange to explore a range of methods, topics, and encounters that reveal the shape of systems, desires, and connections.
We will go over and under the counter, tracing the seams between licit and illicit commerce, regulations and irregular activities, counterfeits and the real deal. We will take up counter as a position, investigating how individuals and groups oppose, offset, and seek to correct a range of institutions, points, and practices through counterprotests, countermeasures, and counterattacks. We will tease apart the temporal, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of these and other counter-techniques, exploring how they expand and narrow horizons of possibility, recruit attention, and shape meaning. We will examine histories and contemporary practices of quantification, speculation, and prediction, and ask what happens to data as it moves across domains and scales. Throughout, we will trouble received boundaries and divisions to see who and what is left out of scholarly research and communication.
Past Themes
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 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 examine how the humanities and social sciences connect us to the fleshy rhythms of life.
Under the banner of our 2024–25 theme Worldbuilding and Radical Worldmaking, we hosted a series of distinguished visiting lecturers, artists, activists, and makers to experiment with different techniques to anchor and imagine new worlds while transforming our own. Event attendees explored the horizons of radical worldmaking and learned how to use methods, practices, and ways of knowing from the humanities and social sciences to extend them.
We exchanged and planted seeds, played games, and made posters and banners. We met in local bookstores, in parks, and along the river to walk, talk, and listen in new ways. We re-staged the past to conjure more just futures during the two-day Role-Playing the Humanities event. Our spring keynote lecture, co-sponsored with the College of Arts & Sciences, drew more than 200 attendees to hear 2024 MacArthur Fellow Ruha Benjamin discuss the liberating power of imagination. We distributed 50 copies of her book Imagination: A Manifesto at related events leading up to her lecture. At the spring symposium, Center and Dissertation Fellows reflected on the everyday and extraordinary ways worlds are built in their disciplines and research projects. We hosted an exhibition of Celebrate People’s History Poster series, a nearly 30-year collaborative project curated by Josh MacPhee to broaden our collective historical memory. Josh ran a poster-making workshop at DAAP that drew more than 20 participants from across the university and broader community, underscoring that audiences want to not only read and discuss ideas but enact them!