Taft Research Center Events

taft research center, taft center, taft uc, university of cincinnati, humanities, social sciences, higher ed, public event, lecture, workshop

RSS XML iCal

Cincinnati, OH — Eastern Time

This hCalendar-compliant page is optimized for search engines. View this calendar as published at multisite.uc.edu.

How to Assemble a Life with Fatemeh Rezaei & Stephanie Sadre-Orafai

Join Director and Faculty Chair of the Taft Research Center Stephanie Sadre-Orafai and Taft Graduate Assistant Fatemeh Rezaei for a journaling and journal-making workshop inspired by Amitava Kumar’s The Yellow Book: A Traveller’s Diary (2023). We will discuss the relationship between marking time and making marks, or how a daily writing and reflection practice can invigorate our creative and scholarly endeavors. Participants will learn to make a concertina journal and collectively generate a list of prompts to use in their new hand-made accordion-style sketchbook/diary. Free and open to the public, materials provided. While supplies last, participants will receive a copy of Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life. Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops. Thursday, September 18, 2025, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM. Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

Hormonal Methods with Faye Gleisser

Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Who is perceived as hormonal and why? Whose hormone cycles are idealized and whose hormonal imbalances are criminalized, pathologized, and fetishized—and to what social and political ends? How do these relations of power manifest as visual, material objects and images? And how have artists questioned the very idea of a “hormonally constructed body” (Oudshoorn) and its biopolitical implications for knowledge, embodiment, and being? This lecture centers artists’ radical experimentation with hormonal fluctuations (related to stress, pregnancy, sleep, inflammation, gender identity, metabolism, aging, etc.) and posits that hormones don’t merely modulate our bodies, but instead function as socio-political cultural artifacts. I argue that the ways that such artifacts are manufactured and managed—through state-authorized laws as much by means of fugitive, collective aid and “off label” use—constitutes hormonality, a structural process through which… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures. Wednesday, September 24, 2025, 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM. Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

Slow-Jam the News with Jeshua Schuster

Good Writing Grows Out of Noticing with Chandra Frank

Experiment with time, perspective, and intertextuality in this beginner-friendly painting workshop! Inspired by Amitava Kumar’s painting practice and selections from The Blue Book: A Writer’s Journal (2022) and The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook (2024), we will learn techniques to record and respond to the world around us through drawing, painting, and writing. We’ll “slow-jam the news,” paint trees, and revel in the quiet art of noticing. Free and open to the public, materials provided. While supplies last, participants will receive a copy of Amitava Kumar’s My Beloved Life. About Chandra Frank Dr. Chandra Frank is a feminist queer researcher and independent curator. She is currently Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and the 2024-2027 Taft Professor of Public Humanities. Dr. Frank’s interdisciplinary creative research focuses on feminist and queer of color movement work, possibilities of dissent, and the ways in which race and the environment… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops. Thursday, October 2, 2025, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM. Meet at Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

The Breath of Life with Amitava Kumar

Join our fall keynote speaker Amitava Kumar for a workshop whose title comes from a line by William Maxwell: "After forty years, what I came to care about the most was not style but the breath of life." How are we to find in what we read but also, crucially, in what we write that particular feeling or intimation, touch, unyielding grit or, for that matter, the elusive trace of what we understand as the authentic or the real? Also, how to proceed from specific details to questions of voice and structure. Three short writing exercises will be built around a discussion of passages from Joan Didion, Arundhati Roy, David Foster Wallace, James McPhee, Amy Hempel, and Lydia Davis. About Amitava Kumar Amitava Kumar is professor of English at Vassar College and the author of several nonfiction works and four novels. The books of nonfiction include Husband of a Fanatic, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and A Matter of Rats. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops. Thursday, October 16, 2025, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM. Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

Fall 2025 Keynote: Writing About Others with Amitava Kumar

In sharing portions of his current nonfiction project on India, Amitava Kumar will examine the process through which a book gets assembled: a starting idea, what is repeated or developed as a theme, the changes in the work's conception, missteps, revisions. Professor Kumar has also been assembling a visual archive during this project, and his talk will include a discussion of his interviewing technique and the rules he tries to follow during his travels. The questions he is struggling with include how to structure time and how to order the multiple narratives. He hopes that an interactive discussion will yield insights about how each one of us chooses to write. About Amitava Kumar Amitava Kumar is professor of English at Vassar College and the author of several nonfiction works and four novels. The books of nonfiction include Husband of a Fanatic, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, and A Matter of Rats. His novel Immigrant, Montana was on the best of the year lists at The New Yorker… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures. Thursday, October 16, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM. Valentine Overlook Room, 5280 Clifton Court Hall. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

Punctuating Art in Action with Risa Cromer

Erasure is a process of removing parts of existing text to form something new. More than word play, erasure is a creative and critical tool for exploring possibility within limits. In this hands-on workshop, participants will explore the power of erasure art as it relates to the 2025–26 Taft Center theme: Period. Periods end sentences, mark cycles, and signal rupture as well as renewal. Drawing on this theme, we will consider what happens when altering texts to bring forth new meaning. For instance, how might erasure help us reimagine human relationships with more-than-human worlds? What is revealed or reimagined when erasing what forecloses as well as advances social justice goals, like climate crisis policy or reproductive rights? How do acts of removal require reckoning with what persists, what disappears, and what must change? The session will include a brief overview of the history and ethics of erasure, examples across literary and visual traditions, time to experiment with producing erasure art, and gr… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Multimodal Workshops. Friday, October 24, 2025, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM. Elliston Poetry Room, 646 Langsam Library. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

Hubert Harrison and the Forbidden Periods of Radical History with Brian Kwoba

This talk by Brian Kwoba explores the political life of the journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. Harrison blazed a trail for Black workers and organizers in the Socialist Party of America. He then emerged as the most prominent Black freethinker and free lover of his generation. Most spectacularly, Harrison's Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey and the largest international organization of Africana people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison's revolutionary legacy has been largely erased from popular memory. Until now. About Brian Kwoba Brian Kwoba is an associate professor of history and Director of the African and African American Studies Program at the University of Memphis. Over the past two decades, Dr. Kwoba has been an activist on issues including anti-imperialism, immigrant workers rights, climate… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures. Monday, October 27, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM. Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

The 1911 Triangle Fire: A New York Story that Resonates across Time & Space with Mary Anne Trasciatti

Unlike most events in US labor history, the passage of time has not erased memory of the Triangle fire. The story continues to inspire labor, immigrant, and women’s rights movements in New York, around the US, and in different parts of the globe. Triangle memory is nurtured by Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a stalwart band of volunteers who connect individuals and groups to the story through the annual commemoration ceremony and other initiatives. In this talk, Mary Anne Trasciatti explores how memory work that is grounded in a single moment and location can connect people across time and space. About Mary Anne Trasciatti Mary Anne Trasciatti is Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Labor Studies at Hofstra University, and a member of the board of directors of Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition. Her research focuses on anti-capitalist social movements, social protest, public space, and the relationship between memory and activism. Her recent books includeElizabeth Gurley Flynn: The Rebel Girl,… Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures. Friday, November 7, 2025, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM. Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.

Period: The Real Story of Menstruation with Kate Clancy

Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Blending interviews and personal experience with engaging stories from her own pioneering research, Kate Clancy challenges a host of myths and false assumptions. About Kate Clancy Kate Clancy is professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she holds appointments in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Program in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology, and at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. She has written for National Geographic, Scientific American, and American Scientist. Audience: Public. Undergraduate. Graduate. Faculty & Staff. Cost: Free. Event Type: Thematic Lectures. Thursday, November 13, 2025, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM. Taft Research Center, Edwards 1, Suite 1100. For more info visit multisite.uc.edu.