As a University Institute, the FHI is a key incubator of interdisciplinary, cross-school collaborations on racial justice, human rights, health, climate, datafication, and other “grand challenges” that, more than ever, require humanistic engagement at every level, from concept to method to content. FHI mobilizes these topics through a set of signature programs and events that bring together faculty, students, staff, and broader publics — both in-person and online — to engage in real-time in intellectual exchange, to puzzle out pressing scholarly questions, and to think toward new ways to study and be in the world.

tgiFHI, the FHI's Friday morning lecture series, gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretive social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental and interdepartmental colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields.

Left of Black, the prolific Webby Awards-nominated web series featuring interviews with Black Studies scholars created and hosted by James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies Mark Anthony Neal, will soon return for its fourteenth season.

Since 2004, Faculty Bookwatch — jointly hosted by the FHI and Duke University Libraries — is an event series that promotes interdisciplinary conversations on notable recent books by Duke faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Inaugurated in 2016-17 under FHI’s Mellon Humanities Futures initiative, the Duke-North Carolina Central University Digital Humanities Fellowship program is designed to increase the uses of DH tools and methods in the NCCU classroom. This initiative builds upon a decade of collaborations with Historically Black Colleges and Universities faculty at the Franklin Humanities Institute, which began in 2008 as an FHI-based residential fellowship program and later evolved into the University-level visiting faculty fellowships under the Mellon Humanities Writ Large and Humanities Unbounded initiatives.

Various thematic series at FHI, including the John Hope Franklin Legacies series — held in honor of our namesake — and Theme Series, round out the Institute's engagement programming.