Taft Research Seminars

This award program supports faculty and research staff who want to develop and deliver credit-bearing research seminars organized around interdisciplinary themes, with readings from multiple disciplinary perspectives and related thematic programming. We provide both $2,500 summer development awards and up to $15,000 seminar awards.

Applications for Taft Research Seminars are currently closed.

Proposals are accepted for new, team-taught Taft Research Seminars each spring and fall related to the annual theme. 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. 

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/or 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) 

Applications must be received through the online portal no later than 5PM on the day of the published deadline. Applicants may not bypass any component of the system or ask the committee to instead view any additional uploaded documents. 

A complete application must include the following: 

1. Abbreviated (two-page) curriculum vitae (CV) of each proposed faculty leading the seminar
2. Seminar name and description
3. A narrative on the co-designed seminar and how it relates to the annual theme
4. A brief discussion of methods and theories to be discussed in the first half of the seminar
5. Proposed activities for the second half of the seminar
6. Anticipated outcomes of the seminar
7. 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 the selected term. 

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.