The Center develops courses, reading groups, and curricular resources for serious engagement with consequential challenges in public life.
CEVIHE develops sustained learning opportunities that help students encounter serious competing ideas, examine evidence, and practice careful argumentation. The Center’s curricular work operates at three levels: recurring programs and reading groups, classes taught by postdoctoral fellows, and an emerging Curriculum Innovation Lab that develops, tests, and shares resources for use at Tufts and across higher education.
Recurring Programs
CEVIHE’s recurring programs serve as intellectual laboratories where students read closely, encounter arguments they may not hear elsewhere, and participate in faculty-guided discussions of difficult political, social, cultural, economic, and moral questions. Many are offered for credit while remaining open to the wider Tufts community. Their recurring structure allows participants to return to disagreement over time, test their assumptions, and develop the habits required for serious intellectual exchange.
Politics and Culture from All Sides
Politics and Culture from All Sides is CEVIHE’s flagship weekly program. Each session begins with a carefully selected reading and a focused question, followed by discussion with Tufts faculty members or invited guests. The series brings multiple disciplines and intellectual traditions into conversation while emphasizing evidence, careful interpretation, and the fair consideration of competing arguments.
Individualism and Nonconformity in Film
Developed in collaboration with the Film and Media Studies Program (FMS), Individualism and Nonconformity in Film uses major works of cinema to examine conscience, authority, dissent, integrity, conformity, and the obligations of public life. Screenings are followed by conversations with faculty discussants who bring historical, political, philosophical, and cinematic perspectives to the films.
Classes Taught by Postdoctoral Fellows
The Postdoctoral Fellowship in Expanding Viewpoints introduces new courses and scholarly expertise into departments and programs across Tufts. Fellows teach within their disciplines while broadening the range of consequential questions, intellectual traditions, methods, and evidentiary approaches available to students.
Current and forthcoming offerings address the economics of education; Christian social and political thought; Jewish history and Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations; literature and the history of economic and political thought; the history of science, cultural heritage, and resource politics; the politics and ethics of public health; American political development; and the ethics and politics of technology.
Course offerings change by semester. Learn more about the Center’s Fall 2026 courses and reading groups, and meet the postdoctoral fellows.
Student-Initiated Programs
CEVIHE supports small, intensive reading groups that allow students to examine intellectual traditions and complex questions that may receive limited sustained attention elsewhere at the university. Some are proposed and developed by students in collaboration with faculty or guest instructors.
The Center’s first student-initiated reading group, Critiques of Liberalism from Karl Marx and the Intellectual New Right, held in Spring 2026, placed Marxist critiques of liberalism in conversation with conservative, nationalist, and post-liberal arguments. CEVIHE’s second student-initiated reading group, Revolution and the Problem of Political Order, offered in Fall 2026, examines the political ideas and moral dilemmas of the French Revolution, from its opening in 1789 through the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in 1794.
Curriculum Development
CEVIHE aims to create a platform for developing and disseminating excellent curricula on contentious public affairs and policy questions. The platform will incorporate expertise from across fields and universities nationwide. It will spur innovation in course development so that students everywhere are better equipped to learn about sensitive political and cultural topics.
Faculty and educators interested in contributing materials, proposing a project, or participating in a pilot are invited to contact CEVIHE.