The Center is currently engaged in the Emotions Project.  The method for investigating the emotions is phenomenological.  Beginning with first-person perspectives, we examine how something becomes meaningful for us in experience, and we inquire after cross-cultural structures of those experiences.  Since the touchstone for such reflection is experience, the orientation of scholarship is problem-based and contextual.

The main themes of investigations have been interpersonal emotions, like hope and despair, trust and betrayal, repentance, guilt, with current work on shame, and future work planned for forgiveness, pride, humility, loving, hating. We investigate these emotions along the axes of temporality, otherness, possibility, and embodiment.