Welcome!
The Charles Phelps Taft Research Center is an intellectually vibrant and nourishing hub for interdisciplinary conversations and collaborations that demonstrate the importance of the humanities and humanistic social sciences in understanding and positively reshaping our world. We offer a range of university and public humanities programs that bring people together. We provide fellowships and awards to faculty and students conducting original research as well as to our 15 member units to enrich their students' experiences.
Our theme for the 2025–26 academic year is Period. Through lectures and workshops we will 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 will examine how the humanities and social sciences connect us to the fleshy rhythms of life. Read the full description here.
Call for Applications
2026–28 Taft Postdoctoral Fellow
Scholars who received or will receive their PhD between May 2021 and June 2026 from any field or related field represented by our 15 member units are invited to apply for our 2026–28 Taft Postdoctoral Fellowship. The fellowship is designed to provide emergent, interdisciplinary scholars with time to further their work in a cross-disciplinary setting, mentoring from faculty members in their fields, and opportunities to develop public-facing programming related to their research. We are particularly interested in scholars whose work can speak to our 2026–27 theme Counter, which explores questions of quantification, representation, and opposition, asking what kinds of accounting the current moment demands, as well as reflections and responses to what the humanities are up against.
Application review begins March 31, 2026. Read the full job description here.