Where the Wilderness Brings People Together: Taft-Nicholson Center Wraps 2025 Season

Twenty-seven miles of gravel road unfurl through sagebrush steppe and grasslands, opening onto a classic American West view of a mountain basin cradling the largest wetland complex in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Here, in a cluster of restored historic buildings, an unlikely convergence is taking place.

A psychology professor works on research in the morning. By afternoon, a printmaker demonstrates her artistic craft to graduate students from the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Program. That evening, Centennial Valley locals arrive for potluck dinner and a lecture on artificial intelligence delivered by a visiting scientist. This is not a typical academic gathering. This is the University of Utah’s Taft-Nicholson Environmental Humanities Education Center (TNC), and it is a case study for the magic that happens when students and scholars leave campus and engage with their disciplines in nature and a broader community.

The center's mission sounds ambitious on paper: bridge the humanities, arts, and sciences to engage complex environmental issues. But the real innovation isn't in the mission statement. It's in the deliberate architecture of encounter that the center has built, both physical and social.

The location isn’t without its challenges – due to Montana’s harsh winters the center season only lasts a handful of months, from June through September. But TNC makes that most of the time. In 2025 alone, the center hosted twelve classes from five academic institutions, nine faculty fellows from seven University of Utah departments, and five artists-in-residence from three states. The disciplines represented ranged from mechanical engineering to Korean ink painting, from public affairs to printmaking. The shared element was space and place. Everyone shares the same dinner tables, the same evening lectures, the same early morning light filtering through stands of aspen and pine trees that surround the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.

Erin DiGiovanni, artist-in-residence, worked on a series of eco-prints on paper and fabric with plants foraged from the Centennial Valley. She explains, “Eco-printing uses botanicals to create impressions of plants while also extracting their dye during the printing process…most of the eco prints made during the residency produced a bright neon yellow. This yellow became a symbol of change and movement, a call for attention and a warning. In the process of creating the work, each print became a precious reflection of my experience in the Centennial Valley.”

DiGiovanni reflects on the sense of community she found at TNC: “A highlight of my residency is the time spent collecting the plants and getting to know the valley better, both alone and with others. It was inspiring to learn and share with academics and professionals whose work was tied to Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and the surrounding area.”

This proximity that DiGiovanni finds so inspiring is an essential part of what makes the TNC so special. Rodolfo da Silva Probst, a post-doctoral fellow with the U’s Science Research Initiative (SRI) shares an enthusiasm for the unexpected kinship that springs up at the center. After attending four summer SRI retreats at the center, da Silva Probst, whose research focuses on ant-plant symbioses, describes the retreats as “serendipitous.” According to him, the planned activities and work to shape the upcoming year’s SRI programming is crucial, but the real magic happens because, as he says, “We get to know each other, too – so new ideas are surging as a product of these gatherings as we are getting comfortable with people we work with every day and get to know them not just as scientists, but as humans.”

The thread of community and sense of place draws the Environmental Humanities (EH) Program back annually for new student orientation. EH students arrive for their first-year orientation and immediately engage with an ecosystem that frames their studies. Danielle Endres, professor of communication and director of the program, says, "The Taft-Nicolson Center is the ideal place for students to begin their Environmental Humanities graduate program. Not only does it allow for the type of place-based environmental education that is essential for the environmental humanities but is also allows for the students to build relationships and a sense of community to support each other through the two-year degree."

Even more integration happens in the informal moments. The U of U English Department’s Artist Colony writing retreat overlaps with a research group from Louisiana State University studying fish populations and habitat. Artists working on Centennial Valley-inspired musical compositions perform for and mingle with faculty fellows conducting research on infectious disease or mathematics pedagogy. A University of Montana research project on the Lesser Scaup intersects with the Science Research Initiative retreat. These aren't planned collaborations; they're ambient collisions made possible by the center's unique structure, sparking creativity and invigorating the center’s guests.

Part of TNC’s ethos is community integration. Says Melissa Parks, Associate Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center, “We’ve worked really hard to become positive, contributing members of the local Centennial Valley community.” Every Wednesday during the summer season, the center hosts "Knowledge on Wednesday," a potluck and lecture series that's open to community members, students, faculty fellows, and artists – anyone willing to drive the valley's dirt roads for dinner and conversation.

The 2025 topics reveal both the breadth of visiting scholars' work and the center's commitment to public intellectual life. Center visitors and valley residents alike – ranchers, refuge workers, small business owners – gathered to hear about the aerial combat of hummingbirds, the whitewater rafting industry's gender dynamics, and the utility of generative AI.

Maria Blevins, associate professor of communication at Utah Valley University, kicked off the Wednesday lectures this year. Reflecting on the experience, Blevins remarks on the unusual mix of audience members – conservationists attending a workshop at the wildlife refuge, scientists working in the field, and even a group of young seasonal employees working in the valley for the summer. She says, “What was very cool is that there were people in the audience who manage seasonal employees, and my research is about [issues of] sexual harassment, sexual assault, and even sexism in super male-dominated seasonal outdoor workplaces, where people are particularly vulnerable because you're living and working together. Even though the audience wasn’t necessarily whitewater-focused, a lot of the themes felt familiar so the discussion was really excellent on how do you create a supportive community? The discussion was really great in a way that I hadn't even anticipated.”

The interim manager of Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge presented on conservation efforts in the valley itself, closing a feedback loop between the center and its surrounding landscape. Recent Environmental Humanities graduate Madi Sudweeks discussed community-engaged work supporting Native lands in White Mesa, Utah –the kind of on-the-ground scholarship that benefits from an audience beyond academia's typical boundaries. As Sudweeks points out, “The questions we ask in the humanities can often be abstract. Having a space where you can see and deal with those big ideas in material form, like we can here in the Centennial Valley, is really exciting and unique.”

This weekly ritual in a comfortable setting does something powerful: it makes scholarship feel necessary rather than ornamental, connected to lived experience rather than sealed off from it.

The Taft-Nicholson Center itself exists because of an unusual act of preservation. John and Melody Taft purchased the tiny town of Lakeview and restored the historic buildings with the generous help of Bill and Sandi Nicholson. The Tafts and Nicholsons then partnered with the University of Utah to create the center.

But the real infrastructure is less visible. It's in the clear air, the scholars and students experiencing a shared, temporary displacement and the awe of the environment’s complexity. It’s the reprieve from the daily work of teaching and administrative obligations, the chance to focus on deep work without interruption. It’s the residency program that attracts artists from all over the West and beyond. It’s the potluck dinners, the chats, the silent moments of watching birds splash down on the lake. It's the location itself – remote enough to feel removed from institutional pressures, spectacular enough to remind everyone why they're thinking about environmental questions in the first place. Says Parks, “Like every other season, 2025 was wonderfully unique, shaped by enthusiastic and intellectually engaging students, faculty, artists, and community members—not to mention Centennial Valley itself. We are grateful for another successful season.”

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How to Get Involved with the Taft-Nicholson Center

For more information or to sign up for TNC’s monthly newsletter, visit taft-nicholson.utah.edu. You can also find the Center on Instagram: @uofutaftnicholsoncenter.

 Group and classes: the Center welcomes undergraduate and graduate courses, writing groups, faculty retreats, and other groups. If you are interested in bringing a group to the Center, please apply here: https://taft-nicholson.utah.edu/classes-and-groups/applications.php. Applications will remain open until the 2026 schedule is filled. The calendar fills up quickly, so feel free to reach out to Director Mark Bergstrom or Associate Director Melissa Parks at Taft-NicholsonCenter@utah.edu if you have questions about course planning.

Faculty Fellowships: University of Utah faculty from all disciplines are invited to apply for a faculty fellowship at the Taft-Nicholson Center. Applications are due by March 31: https://taft-nicholson.utah.edu/faculty-fellows/facultyfellowshome.php

Artist-in-Residence applications are currently open and are due on January 31: https://taft-nicholson.utah.edu/artist-in-residence/residency-application.php