2025-2026 Theme: Un/Bound

Bound, Bind, Bonds — these interrelated terms have long shaped humanities scholarship, offering frameworks to explore socio-cultural, historical, and economic relationships. Binding, for example, may describe bodily modifications that align inner identity with outward appearance. To be bound can evoke temporal stuckness or dissonance, or signal connection to structures that guide but also constrain, while Bondage names systems of confinement and exclusion. Yet these terms also gesture toward affective ties—community, intimacy, and solidarity.

This year’s theme invites reflection on the various ways we are bound and unbound, as well as the shifting forms that binding and bonds can take.

2026-2027 Theme: Materialities

Inspired by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, CHAT’s 2026–2027 theme explores the multiple ways that matter—human and nonhuman—shapes our world. This includes sonic, physical, geographic, and affective materialities, each offering a lens to examine the forces, forms, and interactions that surround us. By attending to the vitality of materials and their entanglements with social, cultural, and ecological systems, the theme invites reflection on how the human and nonhuman co-constitute realities. Through research, creative work, and interdisciplinary dialogue, CHAT seeks to illuminate the dynamic material dimensions of experience, perception, and the world we inhabit.

Humanities Through Art Contest 

During 2025-2026, CHAT launched the Humanities Through Art Contest to create a space for students to explore the humanities by channeling emotional energy, critical thinking, and responses to current events through art. Entries engaged with the 2025-2026 them, Un/Bound, reflecting the complexity of human experience and the transformative power of the arts. The winning submissions are on display in CHAT.

Theatre Journal

CHAT’s Center Director is joining Theatre Journal as Co-Editor starting Fall 2025. For more than 70 years, Theatre Journal has been at the forefront of scholarship in theatre, dance, and performance studies. CHAT is thrilled to support the journal’s operations and strategic vision, reflecting our commitment to advancing humanistic inquiry and fostering innovative research in the performing arts. We look forward to helping the journal continue its influential role in shaping scholarly conversations in the humanities. Learn more about Theatre Journal.