About

The Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center advances experimental research methods, public humanities scholarship, and collaborative approaches to knowledge creation that engage the Sheridan Libraries’ rare books, archives, and manuscripts at Johns Hopkins University. Through interdisciplinary and community-engaged initiatives, the Tabb Center connects scholarly inquiry with public dialogue, bridging the resources of the university with the broader community.

The Tabb Center offers opportunities for student-initiated learning inside and outside the classroom. Semester-long, community-based, intersession, and SOUL courses delve into a wide array of topics through the analysis of archives, performance, and media.

We welcome partnerships and collaborations that align with our mission to bridge academic scholarship with community-engaged research and the arts. We invite students, faculty, staff, and community members to contact us with interest in partnering and request co-sponsorship to support research initiatives, artistic projects, and performances that expand and enrich the ways knowledge is produced and shared in Baltimore.

Public Humanities

The Tabb Center contributes to the most recent “public turn” in the academy, which is renewing interest in participatory action research, community-based learning, and collaborative approaches to knowledge creation. Experiments with digital storytelling, virtual reality, and participatory archiving reflect a desire to rethink how and why academics produce research, with whom, and for whom. By cultivating an exchange of knowledge between the university and broader Baltimore community, the Tabb Center brings together wide-ranging publics as partners in research, education, and creative expression.

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Fellowships

Tabb Center Public Humanities Fellows

Dean’s Undergraduate Research Awards

Special Collections First-Year Fellows

Research Fellowships

The Tabb Center’s fellowship programs promote interdisciplinary research with the Libraries’ rare books, manuscripts, and archives. The Special Collections First Year Fellows and Dean’s Undergraduate Research Award support independent undergraduate research. Our Public Humanities Fellowships, comprising non-institutionally affiliated organizers, artists, and public historians, mobilize archives and manuscripts to imaginatively interpret histories of racial, gender, and sexual justice.

Research Labs

The Tabb Center invites students and faculty to request co-sponsorship for research labs that support collaboration between faculty, students, and community partners. The Center currently coordinates the Trans Histories Lab, which promotes non-extractive research on trans history and cultural production in Baltimore. Composed of grassroots organizers, artists, students, and faculty, the Trans Histories Lab promotes cross-pollination between courses, lectures, oral history research, and special collections acquisitions.

he Tabb Center is based in the Sheridan Libraries, which houses a vast collection of rare books, oral histories, historic documents, and other materials.

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Upcoming Events

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Performance and the Arts

The Tabb Center approaches the arts and performance as vital modes of learning, preserving, and transmitting knowledge. By doing so, we seek to expand conventional understandings of “research” and “knowledge” in academic spaces. We are committed to artistic experiments that reimagine knowledge production in critical dialogue with institutional norms by prioritizing practices rooted in minoritized publics. Notable examples include the Peabody Ballroom Experience and Nicoletta Darita de la Brown’s Be(longing). The Tabb Center invites students, faculty, and staff to request co-sponsorship for artistic and performative interpretations of manuscripts and archives.

Established by President Ronald J. Daniels and Johns Hopkins University’s board of trustees, the Tabb Center is named in honor of Winston Tabb for his enduring support of original scholarship. Winston Tabb, the Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums from 2002 to 2022, enjoyed a distinguished libraries career that spanned five decades.