2025-2026 Initiatives
The Aurality Hub
Starting in the spring of 2024, this multidisciplinary group will be offering a series of events to engage faculty and their guests. This group is a collaborative initiative between the music department, the SMFA, and the Center for the Humanities. The Aurality Hub aims to reposition the media of academic inquiry and disciplinary hierarchies by way of the aural register - sound, music, noise, silence; orality, soundscape; listening, hearing; acoustics, vibrational practices and more.
The Aurality Hub met three times in the fall of 2025, bringing in several guest speakers and musicians over the course of these meetings.
Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies Initiative
Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies (AMEMS) is an initiative at Tufts University intended to bring together faculty, students, and staff around shared interests in the study of ancient, medieval, and early modern topics.
The initiative offered
- opportunities to meet (monthly or bi-monthly) to connect, share research, and discuss key issues of interest to the group in cultural, historical, methodological, and theoretical matters
- empower undergraduate and graduate students and their research
- connect students with relevant faculty, staff, and resources across the university
- identify collaboration opportunities across departments and units
- share insights on research, funding, teaching, mentorship, and career development
- in time, develop a speaker series and workshops to broaden access to research and mentorship
AMEMS gatherings - centered on research presentations, discussions, and mentorship - took place in the seminar room at CHAT (Fung House, 48 Professors Row, Medford, MA 02155) on the following Fridays during the fall and spring semesters (12:00-1:15 pm).
OCTOBER 10, 2025 | NOVEMBER 14, 2025 | JANUARY 16, 2026 | FEBRUARY 13, 2026 | MARCH 13, 2026 | APRIL 10, 2026
This event was hosted by Alice Isabella Sullivan, History of Art and Architecture (alice.sullivan@tufts.edu) and Gregory Crane, Classical Studies (gregory.crane@tufts.edu)
The Mahler Sessions
In the spring of 2026, the Music Department hosted The Mahler Sessions, an exciting spring series of student-led conversations with leading classical musicians of today and tomorrow, all of them appearing for the first time on Tufts campus to discuss the influence of Gustav Mahler on their work. This series was hosted by Jeremy Eichler, the John McCann Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Music, and co-sponsored by CHAT.
Slavery, Colonialism and Their Legacies
The Slavery, Colonialism, and Their Legacies at Tufts University (SCL) Initiative was created to illuminate the history of slavery and colonialism within and beyond Tufts, shaping the future of how universities study their institutional pasts.
Through original, interdisciplinary research, public programming, and community partnerships, SCL examined:
- The University’s historical ties to racial slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism in Massachusetts and across the Atlantic world;
- The historic Black and Afro-Native communities of Charlestown, Medford, Somerville, Boston, and Grafton;
- The Universalist religious tradition upon which Tufts was founded and the tradition’s relationship to slavery, antislavery, and social movements; and
- The long presence of African-descended and Indigenous students on the Tufts campus.
University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons
Funded by a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, the initiative “University Ecologies and the Question of the Commons” is a three-year project that explores, questions, and complicates what it might mean to re-common these university ecologies. Over the course of 2025–2026, the University Ecologies Initiative hosted many events on these topics, inviting academics, artists, farmers, and professionals to the Tufts campus.
