Taft Distinguished Professors
The Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professorship is one of the highest honors available to faculty at the University of Cincinnati. The program is designed to reward our most outstanding faculty with a title and dedicated research line, affording monies to conduct and share research. The Distinguished Professorships are awarded based on scholarly distinction. Faculty with a strong reputation for outstanding scholarly and/or creative work, particularly scholarly work done in the recent past expected to continue into the future, will be most competitive. This honor is open to all Taft-eligible tenured (associate or full) faculty.
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. Each annual $5,000 allotment must be spent during the same fiscal year as the award granted unless prior approval from the Taft Director. Taft Distinguished Professors are expected to deliver an inaugural lecture/presentation to the UC community, serve on review committees during the five-year professorship, and participate Taft activities, as relevant.
Applications are now open for the 2025–2030 Taft Distinguished Professorships.
Current Taft Distinguished Professors
Dr. Heidi Maibom is the 2025–2030 Taft Distinguished Professor, and 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).
Dr. Maibom has published several books on empathy, including Empathy (Routledge 2020) and the Space Between: How Empathy Really Works (Oxford University Press 2022), as well as two edited volumes, Knowing Me, Knowing You (Oxford), edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge 2017), and Empathy and Morality (Oxford 2014).
Read more about Dr. Maibom here: https://www.heidimaibom.com/
Dr. Shailaja D. Paik is a 2023–2028 Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research 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. Read more about Dr. Paik here: https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/paiksa
Dr. Sharrell D. Luckett is a 2023–2028 Charles P. Taft Distinguished Professor of Drama and Performance Studies and the 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 who was honored by Black Masks magazine as one of 25 Black Theatre Game Changers in the field (2021), and was recently nominated for the Paul Robeson Award by Actors’ Equity Association.
In addition to co-penning four musicals, publishing nearly thirty essays and giving talks and Master Classes at nearly seventy institutions, Dr. Luckett has also published a chapter in Running the Long Race in Gifted Education, which has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. Dr. Luckett has published YoungGiftedandFat: An Autoethnography of Size, Sexuality, and Privilege, Routledge (2018), and Transweight: Poems from an Undercover Fat Girl, (2014), edited African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity (Bucknell/Rutgers University Press, 2019) and coedited Black Acting Methods: Critical Approaches (Routledge, 2017), as well as Tarell Alvin McCraney: Theater, Performance, and Collaboration (Northwestern University Press, 2020). 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.
You can learn more about her dynamic career at www.sdluckett.com, www.BlackActingMethods.com, and https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/lucketsl.
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.
N.B. In late 2022 this program was changed from a previous model that allowed faculty to hold the Taft Distinguished Professorships until retirement. Then, as now, awards were based on scholarly distinction.