The Center for Humanities at Tufts supports a variety of faculty and student-led research projects and academic groups. Through these efforts, our goal is to provide resources and space for interdisciplinary collaboration in the humanities, humanistic social sciences, and the arts. Faculty or students interested in developing new research initiatives, working groups, or collaborations should reach out to us. Proposals are welcome. Below are some of our current and past initiatives.
American Medical Directories Project
Until now, physician records from medical directories were only available in hard copy or as PDFs, making it difficult to visualize and explore patterns and trends. The American Medical Directories Project, managed by Dr. Benjamin Chrisinger, seeks to make medical directories available and searchable, and to thereby make trends in medical care more accessible. Fuller details about this project will be forthcoming soon.
Slavery, Colonialism, and their Legacies at Tufts
Beginning in 2023, the Center for the Humanities, in partnership with the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy (CSRD), the Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC) and the Office of Provost, will take a leading role in a university-wide collaborative research initiative to examine the history of slavery, colonialism, and their legacies at and beyond Tufts University. The project will provide systematic, sustained support for interdisciplinary scholarship and public programming focused on Tufts’ historical ties to the African American and Afro-Native communities of West Medford and Somerville; American empire and colonial dispossession; anti-slavery, Universalism, and social movements; and the long presence of African descended and indigenous people and communities on Tufts’ campus.
University Ecologies
Many important environment justice studies are emerging from universities, conducted with communities most impacted by the transformations of state and capitalist projects. Less critical attention is paid to the university institution itself as a historical and ongoing generator of unequal ecologies. From chemically saturated lawns to confined animal feeding operations, the American university has often led the development of labor-intensive ecological monocultures that fence out biological diversity while fencing in a select few fragile species and marginalized human communities. This three-year project explores, questions, and complicates what it might mean to re-common these university ecologies. Developing modes of collaboration across inherited divisions of class, labor and geography, this project models a vision of education and knowledge production for a collective agriculture that centers those dispossessed of land, and those now made to work within these terrains.
Working groups
CHAT occasionally offers professors or more administrators in the humanities at Tufts space in our conference room for various working groups to meet. We can also offer support in advertising events or other small administrative support. Learn more here about programs we have supported.
