Each academic year, CHAT has an organizing theme that informs our intellectual focus for our events and intellectual output. Explore past annual themes here. Our current theme, for 2026-2027 is "Taking Place/Making Space." You can read more about it in our About section.
Past Themes
Frequently, the study of the humanities is the study of “legacies”—cultural, intellectual, and historical inheritances which inform our contemporary understanding and expression. Often humanistic scholars investigate how the past—in literature, philosophy, art, sciences, and historical events—continues to exert influence on present identities, narratives, and institutions. This focus encourages critical engagement with the transmission, preservation, and reinterpretation of ideas across generations, revealing how legacies can both enrich and complicate modern discourses. Whether analyzing colonial histories, classical texts, scientific practices, or artistic traditions, humanities research uses the notion of legacy to trace continuity, critique inherited structures, and imagine how past cultures were informed by the actions of their own forefathers.
The climate crisis and accompanying sustainability strategies are one of the most pressing emergencies of our historical moment. At the same time, we are experiencing upheavals across political, economic, cultural, and campus climates. Through this theme, the Center invites reflection on how scholars in the humanities, the humanistic social sciences, and the arts can partner across disciplines to address the urgent challenges of “climate,” broadly conceived.
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.
Bringing together artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of disciplines, the Center aims to foster conversations and
collaborations that will advance the critical study of empire. Drawing on diverse perspectives from critical ethnic studies, visual arts, religious studies, anthropology, carceral studies, history, performance studies, and psychology, we will grapple with the long shadows and enduring realities of colonialism, imperialism, and racial-settler capitalism through a variety of geographic, temporal, and theoretical frames.
Emergency is the quality of our present moment: a time of crises and a point of rupture through which new conditions of possibility may emerge. Through this theme, the Center will be committed to exploring the various deeply interrelated crises that produce the emergencies of our moment, many of which appear to strike at the very core of social consensus around what is truth, the nature of justice, and the value of life. We will ask: Is this a point of rupture, or of return?
Within the framework of this theme, the Center’s activities will highlight the ways by which traditions of knowledge production — in particular, academic knowledge production – have served as foundational to the social formations and power relations that produce and inscribe forms of difference around the globe. Through this theme, the Center will explore the ways by which social and historical forms of difference remain determinative in our present political moment, and the role that re-articulations of difference in political mobilizations and cultural discourse.
Culture, History and Translation considers longer histories of connection, exchange, and interdependency in ways that unsettle discretely bounded territories and recast received historical periods. It does so by reconsidering formerly studied “areas” by reassigning the global study of Europe, transoceanic studies, hemispheric American studies, global Black diaspora studies, and global Asia studies. Specifically, we critically engage translation as interceding on settled notions of culture and history and as imbricated in constructions of colonialism, race, empire and diaspora.
This theme encompassed theories of materialism from older Greek philosophical traditions, through modern dialectical materialism and scientific materialism, to the range of approaches currently referenced as the “new materialism.” It included projects in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences, and suggested that culture, society, history, environment, religion, arts, and representation, as well as ontology, epistemology, and politics, are rethought in relation to material processes, objects, and affects.
