The world needs our understanding of history, ethics, legal and political theory, religion, language, culture, and the analysis of the literary and artistic realms that give us insight into how people have made sense of and indeed created the world.
This has been a big year for the Franklin Humanities Institute with the reintroduction of a Short Residencies program (thanks to the support of the Schiff Family Dean of the Arts and Humanities), wrapping up two dynamic humanities labs, a vibrant slate of graduate working groups, a series of incredibly stimulating events through our Entanglement Project, and a reflection on the humanities at Duke to coincide with Duke’s 100th anniversary and FHI’s 25th.
It has been a challenging year around the world with political upheaval, war, an escalation of extraordinary violence that has led to an allegation of genocide being brought to the International Court of Justice. As citizens of a university, we have been horrified by the destruction of educational facilities from primary schools to institutions of higher learning in Gaza, and shocked by the targeting of our colleagues. The upheaval in US universities has also been sobering, with 150 campuses calling the police on student protesters. In the meantime, humanities departments are getting closed down across the US - at a moment when the world needs our understanding of history, ethics, legal and political theory, religion, language, culture, and the analysis of the literary and artistic realms that give us insight into how people have made sense of and indeed created the world.
Our various programs of collective learning, including the Manuscript Migration Lab and the Amazon Lab, have brought many faculty and graduate students into the Institute in areas of expertise with historical, geographical, and linguistic range, engagement with many different media, and a grappling with marginalized knowledge and the ethics of institutional archives. In our seminars and reading groups with visiting professors, we have modeled serious conversation around contentious issues with sometimes profound disagreement. Collective study has come alive again with twelve graduate student-led working groups, and we have piloted a new intensive doctoral summer seminar in the entangled work on race, environment and well-being.
The work of Duke Human Rights Center, the Forum@FHI, Left of Black, major grant-funded initiatives such as the Social Practice Lab and SNCC and Grassroots Organizing continue to thrive, along with publication-focused projects like the Faculty Book Manuscript Workshops. Individual book manuscript workshops in which collective discussion allows for improved books, or projects that look outside the university walls that allow us to see how our city is changing, or seminars and discussions engaging the application of human rights locally and globally: these questions concerning scale, how to traverse them intellectually as well as administratively, provide the pulse of our labor.
As an Institute named after one of the world’s most influential historians of the past century, the work of assembling, recovering, and reimagining archives has always been central to how we understand the legacy of John Hope Franklin. This past year we have begun to use Black Archives as a thematic framework to knit together already existing FHI-supported projects with nascent initiatives, from the SNCC Legacy Project's inter-generational movement history to the Bass Connections Musical Archive of Care team's recentering of Black women musicians, from Left of Black's digital mobile network of black studies to our new partnership with the Stuart Hall Archive Project in Birmingham, UK.
We have initiated our 25th anniversary celebrations with discussions with the founders of FHI, and with others who have been essential in building and sustaining the humanities at Duke and at large. As we prepared to publish this report, news came of the passing of our beloved colleague Fredric Jameson. In the spirit of Fred's intellectual generosity and his transformative legacy at Duke, we will continue with the work of making sense of the world, individually and collectively. May the humanities at Duke continue to thrive.
— Ranjana Khanna
Full house at Climate Change, Decolonization & Global Blackness lecture
From Dissertation to Book: Gita Manaktala (l) and Ken Wissoker share editorial wisdom with Moderator Christine Folch and audience
Scenes of Collective Study
Collective joy after an intensive week at the CLIMATE CHANGE, DECOLONIZATION & GLOBAL BLACKNESS SUMMER GRADUATE WORKSHOP
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Faculty and students engrossed in deep discussion with SCHOLAR IN RESIDENCE Denise Ferreira da Silva.
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STUART HALL ARCHIVE RESEARCH FELLOWS Ruki Prathivadhibhayankaram, Nzinga Simmons, and Jazmin Maco exploring the archive together
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WEEKLY POSTDOC WRITING GROUP organized by ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow Sharon Kunde (leftmost).
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FHI's Humanities Labs, a core Institute program, are faculty-led interdisciplinary projects organized around a central theme. Versatile in form and experimental in spirit, a Lab is simultaneously an incubator of research projects, a hub of courses, a host of events, and a platform for collaborations with campus and community, national and international partners.
In Spring 2024, two cornerstone FHI Humanities Labs — the Amazon Lab and the Manuscript Migration Lab — completed their cycles of work. The Amazon Lab forged new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the Amazon region by centering indigenous thought and linking the studies of art, media, politics, and environment. The Manuscript Migration Lab took up the legal, ethical, and political dimensions of cultural heritage as situated within global markets, networks, and political systems. Both Labs were funded by the FHI and the Office of Global Affairs, with additional support from the Mellon Humanities Unbounded grant.
Both Labs will continue to live on through the projects "incubated" during their time at the FHI. Jenny Knust will begin co-teaching "Loot: Who Owns the Past," a sophomore course in Duke's new Transformative Ideas program. William Johnson will continue to work with colleagues on an initiative designed to make the provenance of the entire Duke papyri collection freely accessible and transparent. The Amazon Lab will continue to engage indigenous thinkers, artists, and media makers through a new working group on Ecological Thought.
In the midst of a multi-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Practice Lab, led by Research Professor of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies Pedro Lasch, has staged public interventions, facilitating in-person and virtual visiting artist residencies, and conducting innovative artistic research. A major ongoing project is "Colors, Bodies, Powers," a new installment of the Lab's ongoing online course ART of the MOOC, designed and co-taught by a brilliant group of scholars, curators, and artists with the SPL.
Amazon Lab
Gustavo Furtado, Lab Co-Director & Associate Professor of Romance Studies
In a number of events, like the “Counter-cartographies of the Amazon” symposium, the Amazon Lab was able to create conversations among artists, activists, scholars from several disciplines, and many indigenous thinkers and cultural producers. It is rare to see this happen anywhere in academia — and it is great to see it happening at the FHI with the participation and leadership of students.
Manuscript Migration Lab
Jenny Knust, Lab Co-Director & Professor of Religious Studies
Through the Mapping Manuscript Migration exhibit, the Lab was able to showcase our research on the lives and afterlives of rare books and manuscripts in the Duke Library collections, in a way that was accessible and significant to a wide audience at Duke and beyond. The exhibition, and the Lab more generally, connected to the FHI’s mission by stimulating fresh conversations about social equity globally and locally while also bringing together student researchers at every level (undergrad through grad), faculty and staff from across divisions and departments, and involving our deeply missed late colleague and Humanities Unbounded fellow Gay Byron (1952-2023).
Social Practice Lab
Pedro Lasch, Lab Director + Research Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
One highlight of the Lab has been our productions with Mellon Artistic Research Fellow Sherrill Roland, in partnership with the OIT Innovation CoLab. Roland is an extraordinary artist and human being, whose wrongful incarceration and eventual exoneration have led to a powerful body of work. Processing Systems, which opened at the Nasher Museum in September, includes artworks, works in progress, and research materials from Roland's ongoing exploration of the criminal justice system. I feel very lucky to be part of a growing Duke and FHI community that understands the crucial significance of artistic research and socially engaged methods for a top-level university.
Each year we are thrilled to spotlight new books published by “alumni” of the Faculty Book Manuscript Workshops. The Workshops bring the spirit of collective study to the often solitary labor of book-writing, providing clarifying insights to authors (including many completing their first monographs) in the final stretch. A signature program in their own right, the Book Workshops are now part of a robust slate of services offered by the FHI's Director of Scholarly Publishing and Research Opportunities, which includes proposal consultations for fellowship, grant, or book as well as "publishing literacy" programs such as the popular From Dissertation to Book.
We also celebrate faculty books by bringing discerning readers across the disciplines into conversation, for example through Faculty Bookwatch, a joint annual event presented by the FHI and the Duke University Libraries. The 2023 Bookwatch title was Birthing Black Mothers by Jennifer C. Nash.
New from Faculty Book Manuscript Workshops
Taylor Black, English
"For the most part, book-writing is a lonely business. All the researching, thinking, planning, outlining, drafting, and re-drafting happens alone. But as alone as writing makes you feel, you cannot do it all by yourself. For me, the FHI Book Manuscript Workshop was nothing short of a blessing. It happened at the end of a very long period during which I practically lived in my basement, hacking away at my book and wondering if I’d ever be able to come back to earth. Being able to sit down and receive insights from my editor and colleagues from and outside Duke helped me see the book as a book (and not just some private fever dream) for the first time. I cannot say enough about Sylvia Miller’s impactful and clear-sighted advice on my book, guided by her years of experience in academic publishing as well as her gift for conceptualization. I could not have finished the book without the support, expertise, and time given by folks at FHI."
Jointly hosted by the FHI and Duke University Libraries since 2004, Faculty Bookwatch is an event series that promotes interdisciplinary conversations on notable recent books by Duke faculty in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. Each program brings together a panel of distinguished colleagues from Duke and other universities, giving brief comments on the significance and impact of the featured book. The author also participates in the panel and the following Q&A.
Faculty Bookwatch
The Jennifer Nash Faculty Bookwatch event was a highlight for me last year. We always have a great turnout at these events celebrating a new book, but there was a special level of buzz around this one celebrating Birthing Black Mothers. The panelists spoke with conviction and grace, and I loved seeing faculty and graduate students and undergraduates coming in and out of the room as their schedules allowed! I’ve always said that Bookwatch is the smartest, best kind of book party.
Sylvia Miller, FHI Director of Scholarly Publishing & Research Opportunities
During the 2023-24 academic year, FHI relaunched our Short Residencies program thanks to generous support from the Schiff Family Dean of Humanities and the Arts. A legacy program, FHI’s Short Residencies bring distinguished scholars to campus for intensive engagement with the Duke humanities community. In addition to public talks and other events, our Scholars in Residence lead reading groups, visit classes, hold office hours, and interact in other formal and informal ways with our faculty and students.
In the Fall, David Marriott, Charles T. Winship Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, joined FHI for a series of public events and intensive workshops with graduate students. Highlights included the two-part public series “The Crisis of Truth I and II,” in which Marriott engaged with theories of blackness and its links to truth, lies, and social death.
In the Spring, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, visited FHI to screen two widely exhibited experimental film works (4 Waters—Deep Implicancy and Soot Breath//Corpus Infinitum), collaborations between Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. Ferreira da Silva also led two reading group discussions with the Entanglement Project’s Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness (CCDGB) lab — an outgrowth of Ferreira da Silva’s ongoing collaboration with the lab, which has included additional public lectures and conversations, including with the multidisciplinary artist duo the Otolith Group.
Arjuna Neuman and Denise Ferreira da Silva
In late Fall 2020, still in the throes of global COVID shutdown, the FHI put out a call for Faculty Working Groups. Unsure what if any response we would receive, we were happy to field a modest slate of five groups. For two of these projects, that initial support at a precarious moment led to longer-term, multi-institutional collaborations that have continued to flourish.
Originally proposed by Wesley Hogan (FHI) and Vance Byrd (now at U Penn, then Humanities Unbounded Visiting Faculty Fellow from Grinnell), the 12-member Reckoning and Justice: Art, Historical Memory and Commemoration debuted a toolkit for community-based, community-driven memory work at the 2024 Organizational of American Historians conference.
The Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group, headed at Duke by Sarah Wilbur (Dance), has pressed on with a new book series and has just received a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant (PI, Charlotte Channing, UT Austin) to convene and document a major symposium on the challenge of equity in the US arts and culture sector.
This research collective joins Digital Cairo and Revaluing Care, two Global Collaboration Seed Grants funded by the FHI and Global Affairs around the start of the pandemic that have recently won NEH support to extend their work. Revaluing Care is back under the FHI umbrella as a new Humanities Lab.
Finally, we are thrilled to share the publication of “A Tale of Two Durhams: How Duke University and North Carolina Central University Are Increasing Access and Building Community through DH Pedagogy,” in the essay collection What We Teach When We Teach DH (Minnesota, 2023). The NCCU-Duke DH partnership, launched in 2016 on a foundation of strong relationships with NCCU and other HBCU scholars and administrators, is one of the FHI’s longest-standing current programs. In the article, co-authors Hannah Jacobs, Kathryn Wymer, Victoria Szabo, and W. Russell Robinson critically examine the successes and challenges of the partnership: the teaching-centered DH “community of practice” and new programs it has engendered at NCCU, as well as the resource gaps it has underscored.
FHI’s commitment to supporting burgeoning communities of study extends to our graduate students. This year, 12 graduate working groups explored topics ranging from experimental poetics to Plato in contemporary politics, from liberation theology to critical machine learning.
In line with core Institute programming related to the Entanglement Project, Black Archives, and the Humanities Labs, we introduced several new summer research and engagement opportunities for Duke doctoral students. The first Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop, staged in June 2024 in collaboration the Elemental Media Lab and Environmental Humanities at Brown University, convened 12 doctoral students — six from Duke and six from Brown — to extend the CCDGB Lab’s research into climate change, raciality, and capitalism.
Graduate Working Groups
Michael Cavuto, English
In Spring 2024, the Contemporary Poetics Working Group hosted a reading with Alice Notley, Hoa Nguyen, and Dale Smith, the third in the Solarities poetry series. The reading was an unprecedented opportunity to realize FHI’s commitment to innovative contemporary thought at the nexus of critical discourse and creative practice. To host Alice Notley, one of our most important living poets, and to hold a seminar with her through the Working Group, proved a once in a lifetime experience for undergrads, graduate students, and faculty thinking with poetry from a range of scholarly fields. It was an honor to see such a rich and diverse audience, including people who had driven from hours away, to welcome these three fantastic poets to Duke.
Climate Change, Decolonization & Global Blackness Summer Workshop
Elly Veloria, Cultural Anthropology
Participating in the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness summer workshop was a unique opportunity to collaborate, connect, and build community with a diverse and interdisciplinary group of graduate students beyond my department. This was a memorable workshop which allowed me to work with established and legendary faculty members while also developing my dissertation project, experimenting with new ideas and approaches, and gaining additional theories, methods, and analytical frameworks for my research.
Across the pond, the inaugural recipients of the Stuart Hall Archives Project (SHAP) Summer Research Fellowship engaged in deep archival study at the University of Birmingham, where SHAP is housed. Fellows spent four weeks on-site with the materials of the Jamaican-British theorist and public intellectual, ultimately developing their own research projects geared toward community engagement with the archive.
With support from the Mellon Humanities Unbounded initiative, we provided course development assistantships for two students working, respectively, with the Manuscript Migration Lab and Amazon Lab. Two other students partnered with North Carolina Central University faculty to expand their pedagogic training, as part of our long-running digital humanities partnership with NCCU.
Stuart Hall Archive Summer Research Fellowships
Rukimani Prathivadhibhayankaram, Literature
This was an incredible opportunity to see the evolution and legacy of Cultural/Black Studies through the work of Stuart Hall. The archive was nothing short of inspiring. It left a profound impact on how I see myself as an academic, activist, artist, and cultural theorist.
NCCU DH Course Development Fellowship
Sané Bhattarai, Literature
I thoroughly enjoyed working closely with faculty at NCCU on their Digital Humanities projects for two consecutive summers. Working with multiple faculty members gave me a broad sense of how the digital medium can be harnessed to bring course materials to new life across disciplines, from literature and music to visual studies and architecture. The faculty and I approached the digital not just as a tool but also as a rich repository of concepts and metaphors that can radically transform our understanding of course materials. It was particularly rewarding to see NCCU professors incorporate the university's digital archive of campus newspapers and magazines into their courses. Meeting with the students in one of these courses gave me an invaluable insight into the "user experience" of some of the course modules I helped design. I hope to stay in touch with the faculty and see how their engagement with the Digital Humanities develops in the coming years.
The FHI creates distinctive, intellectually challenging opportunities for undergraduates to study and engage with the world around them, through both curricular and co-curricular pathways.
The Human Rights Certificate, a key pillar of the Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI, offers students an in-depth and rigorous interdisciplinary study of human rights history, theory, and practice – globally and locally.
For Mark Anthony Neal's "Black Popular Culture: From #BlackTwitter to Left of Black" course, FHI Multimedia Director and LoB Producer Eric Barstow joined Neal as a co-instructor, teaching students valuable production skills to go along with social and cultural analysis.
Two FHI-based Bass Connections teams engaged undergraduates in sustained, mentored research that yielded unique opportunities to reach audiences beyond one’s peers. Rosetta Reitz’s Musical Archive of Care – led by anthropologist and Forum @ FHI Director Lou Brown, singer/songwriter Tift Merritt, and archivist Laura Micham – explored the lives and artistic agency of nearly 100 artists featured on a 20th century women’s jazz and blues music label.
With FHI Research Professor Wesley Hogan and OB GYNs Beverly Gray and Jonas Swartz at the helm, Reproductive Health Care Post-Roe documented the living history of abortion providers in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling, through a public-facing oral history audio archive.
Left of Black
For their final project, students in the "Black Popular Culture" course produced their own episode of Left of Black. The students invited Candis Watts Smith, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, to discuss the end of the Reginaldo Howard Scholars Program and the university's DEI commitments.
Human Rights Certificate
In 2024 the DHRC celebrated 8 graduating seniors, with a robust overall cohort of 38 declared students in the certificate program. Senior Capstone students pursued interlinked thesis projects on the Ar-Razzaq Islamic Center, a historic hub of civil and human rights struggles, right here in Durham’s West End neighborhood.
For this report we invited dispatches from FHI-appointed faculty and from the directors of our affiliated centers and initiatives (Duke Human Rights Center, Forum@FHI, Left of Black). The task was to name one highlight from the past year that illustrated something important about their work overall. As with the faculty and student reflections we have shared above and throughout, themes of archive, memory, and justice recur. So too does the ethos of cultivating conversation - of finding wisdom, joy, and thrill in collective learning.
Left of Black
Mark anthony neal, host & creator; James B. Duke distinguished professor of african & african american studies
At our latest "Small Talk at FHI" event, we welcomed the dynamic scholar and hip-hop DJ Lynée Denise on her debut book, Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters, the most comprehensive work to date on the life of rock and roll legend Big Mama Thornton. Not only was the lecture hall packed, but to hear an attendee say she felt "so smart and so Black" from the conversation meant the absolute world to the Left of Black team!
Forum @ FHI
Lou brown, Director of program
One highlight of the year was Anne Firor Scott Public Scholarship Fellow Melissa Karp’s “Recollections Workshop,” bringing together a cross section of university scholars and public history practitioners to share ideas and experiences on the topic of memorials and memorial museums. We shaped the program to focus on conversation more than presentation, with facilitation provided by thoughtful moderators. Since the workshop, we’ve heard from many of the participants that it had a lasting effect on their work, highlighting the value of learning from people they’re not frequently in conversation with, as well as the structure of the workshop.
Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI
Robin Kirk, Co-Director
A highlight for me was using our North Carolina Human Rights website to engage with area high school teachers about how they can incorporate this robust history into curricula and teach kids that they can also be champions of human rights in their communities. Teachers rock!
Faculty Working Groups
Wesley Hogan, FHI Research Professor
A major highlight has been sharing the pamphlet, Reckoning and Justice: Better Practices in Memory Work. This is the fruit of the FHI Working Group convened by Dr. Vance Byrd and myself, bringing together graduate students (some now faculty!), faculty, community-based memory workers, and artists. We have had members present the work over the summer within their own circles at churches, summer schools, field schools, libraries, community-groups, artists’ convenings, and academic peer groups. We’re currently incorporating that feedback and plan for this to be a “living document” that provides guidance to cities, universities, museums, and others wanting to do monuments or commemoration work. The booklet centers the experiences of groups most impacted by a given historical event.
Revaluing Care Lab (Looking Ahead)
Saskia Cornes, FHI Assistant Professor of the Practice
For some time, I’ve been wanting to engage Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity. I’ve been seeking others who want to read the text critically, but who also want to really work with it, and see what it might have to offer us – as educators and as citizens – in terms of praxis. Through the Revaluing Care Lab, FHI is beautifully positioned to hold this kind of complex, interdisciplinary conversation, one that includes faculty across departments, but also community members and others interested in what ecological care might look like, within and between us and the world we collectively inhabit.