The World Is Beating a Path to the Taft House Doors

During the coming 2005-2006 academic year, researchers from Canada, Finland, Honduras, Ireland, Japan and Wales will live and work alongside University of Cincinnati faculty and students thanks to the increased levels of programming support from the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund and from the university itself.

The goal of these exchanges is to bring together researchers from various fields and locations with UC faculty and students to explore particular problems over the length of a quarter or a year.  In the ambitious effort to enhance the local intellectual community in the humanities and social sciences and to attract a new generation of thinkers, students and visiting scholars will be housed together at the Taft House at Stratford Heights and will work together at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at UC, located on the fifth floor of French Hall-West. 

In all, the Taft memorial fund and university support will provide for over 200 awards this year, ranging in size from $500 to $135,000.

During the 2005-2006 academic year, visiting scholars will support research seminars in globalization, Spanish-American poetry and geometric analysis.  They are

• Brenda Assael, University of Wales, Swansea, examines new approaches to the study of globalization.

• Stephen Buckley, National University of Ireland, specializes in geometric analysis and metric measures spaces.

• Juha Kinnunen, University of Oulu, Finland, is regarded as one of the pioneers in nonlinear potential theory.

• Pedro Lastra, University of New York, Stony Brook, examines the intersection of culture and history in Spanish American poetry and is an important Chilean critic and poet in his own right.

• Roberto Sosa, the author of 11 books of poetry, is considered by his peers to be the most important poet alive in Honduras. 

• Mario Vales, University of Toronto, studies the comparative literatures of Latin America and East Central Europe.  He is former president of the Modern Languages Association of America.

• Xiao Zhong, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, holds one of the prestigious five-year Academy of Finland research grants in mathematics.

UC researchers who will spend a year as Taft Center Fellows are

• Edward Dickinson, assistant professor of history, who will focus on understanding the relationship between private behavior and public order in Germany, 1885-1935. 

• Katharina Gerstenberger, associate professor of German Studies, examines viewpoints of the German capital of Berlin, a city experiencing globalization. 

• Wendy Kline, associate professor of history, will conduct the first major study to examine the impact of the women’s health movement on feminism and medicine.

• Robert Skipper, assistant professor of philosophy, is examining the connections between approaches to philosophy of science and biology.

• Rhys Williams, professor of sociology, examines the rhetoric of the “public good.”  Everyone supports the “public good” and opposes “special interests,” but what, precisely, does “public good” mean and how is it defined by our culture, politics and social movements?

• Julian Wuerth, assistant professor of philosophy, looks at author and philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that philosophy must begin with the study of the self. 

Other UC faculty who will also receive fellowship support from the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center during the coming academic year are

• George Bishop, professor of political science, will examine methods to measure public opinion in relation to presidential-approval ratings.

• Donald French, professor of mathematical sciences, will further develop mathematical modeling related to cellular physiology.

• Laura Jenkins, associate professor of political science, examines affirmative-action policies for women and religious minorities in India and will specifically look at mass religious conversion as a form of political protest in that country.

• Alan Sullivan, professor of anthropology, will expand his field research efforts in the southwestern United States.