Seminars
Taft Research Seminars are designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate and 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.
Past seminars have collaborated with community organizations including The Carnegie Galleries, A Picture's Worth, and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House.
Seminars are open to students from across UC.
Fall 2026 Seminar
Urban Exposure
This interdisciplinary seminar led by Dr. Alex Dantzer examines the city through the concept exposure. It explores how urban residents are unequally exposed to heat, noise, pollution, and infrastructural change, and develops counter-methods for sensing and sharing these exposures.
Drawing on medical anthropology, urban studies, disability studies, and environmental humanities, students will treat documentation as a form of analysis, experimenting with sound, video, and sensory attention techniques. They will develop site-based projects in Cincinnati neighborhoods using three integrated methods—field recordings to trace acoustic infrastructures, short observational videos that document environmental rhythms, and sensory mapping to spatialize sound, heat, fatigue, and (im)mobility—and share their findings in a public exhibition.
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)
- Seminars are 3 credit hours and cross-listed under the following course codes: HUM 4010, HUM 7010, SOSC 4010, and SOSC 7010.
- Undergraduate students with junior standing can enroll in HUM or SOSC 4010.
- Graduate students should enroll in HUM 7010 or SOSC 7010.
- Students without junior standing and those interested in auditing should contact the instructors directly for permission to enroll.
It was unlike any other class I've taken! I got to meet people from many different departments and experiment with readings, ideas, and methods that I had not encountered before.
"Atmospheres" student
Past Seminars
Ecology, History & Creative Practice
This interdisciplinary seminar led by Dr. Kate Sorrels (History) and Professor Matt Lynch (School of Art) explores the intersection of historical preservation, environmental conservation, and artistic expression through the lens of a landscape restoration project at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Walnut Hills. Blending creative practice, historical analysis, and environmental stewardship, this course invites students to rethink how we preserve and interpret cultural and natural legacies within urban contexts. Students will learn and practice methods from history, environmental studies, public art, and landscape design; analyze how time is marked in both natural and constructed environments and how these markers influence public memory; and contribute to the growing sculpture garden, exhibitions, and digital storytelling projects. Learn more about the Stowe Garden Project.
Rebounds & Time
This seminar led by Dr. Alex Dantzer (Taft Research Center) questions how we experience, measure, and imagine time. Focusing on rebound (a return, a bounce-back, a shift in direction) we collectively explored how time moves in cycles, layers, and loops, not only in a straight line. Through this lens, we ask: How does time shape our daily routines, memories of the past, and visions of the future? Using tools from cultural studies, critical race theory, philosophy, anthropology, poetry, and time-based arts, we will move between personal schedules and historical archives, between walking and writing, research and making. Partnering with narrative change non-profit A Picture’s Worth, the seminar offers students hands-on experience in story gathering and counter-archival techniques. This course was open to students interested in time, memory, and creative approaches to interdisciplinary study.
Atmospheres
This course led by Dr. Megan Gette aims to understand atmosphere(s) through materialisms, critical STS, sound studies and affect theory. It places particular emphasis on how atmosphere is sensed, shared, and lived through technologies of perceptibility. How is atmosphere composed? What holds it together or pulls it apart? What and whom does it affect? Crucially, we will consider how technological delimitations of the senses prefigure and/or foreclose experience, and explore methodological interventions, objects and forms that make room for uncertainty. Topics and readings may include: air, heat, smog, tear gas, weather, noise, soil, elements, traffic, algae, concrete, humidity, deep sea, 5g, shadows, lightning, the stars, ghosts, earthquakes, balloons, or breath.
Race & Data
This seminar led by Dr. Harhavardhan Bhat asks: What does Race and Data mean in your field of study? What are their materialities, technologies, ecologies, politics, and stories? How does Race work in the machine of your knowledge production? How are these categories invented, accounted, entangled, and disentangled? The course aims at facilitating reflection and strategy within and beyond ongoing contexts of big data through art, the humanities, collaborative practice, critical political theory, feminist, abolitional, and decolonial thought in fabulating methods, approaches, and imagining otherwise worlds.