Graduate Working Groups

FHI's Graduate Working Groups are intended to create more avenues of support for doctoral students in addition to FHI's thematically defined Humanities Labs. All groups are expected to be self-organized; the FHI provides funding for books, meetings, and public events that advance group members’ intellectual agendas.

Learn more about the 2025-26 working groups and browse those of previous years below.

2025-26 Graduate Working Groups

American Studies: Late-Stage Empire?

In their 2025 Call for Proposals, the American Studies Association (ASA) asks “What kind of America is invoked in American Studies and where/how is America studied? Are we living through an historical conjuncture characterized by late-stage American empire?” This working group is focused on how we study the United States in this moment, especially from our position in Durham, and what it might mean for our work if we characterize our historical conjuncture as ‘late-stage American empire.’

The working group will meet biweekly to discuss recent scholarship in the field and hear from Duke faculty engaged in American Studies. Throughout the year, we will consider how American Studies as a field is conceptualizing the future of critical thought, and the ways in which American Studies is and is not a productive space for criticism as dissent, theory, and aesthetic engagement in this moment.

Conveners: Jax Shirey, Alba Mas-Sala, and Jay Butler

Black Feminist Working Group

The Black Feminist Working Group is an interdisciplinary FHI graduate working group that seeks to collectively engage in a deeper understanding of Black feminist theory, practice, and activism. Interested in, but not limited to, questions of resistance, culture and capitalism, performativity and production, land, slavery and indigeneity, as well as complicating concepts of gender, sexuality and queerness, the Working Group focuses on both local and global Black feminist thought. Our guiding questions are: How are theorizations of Black performativity affected by global shifts in migration, climate change, and economic inequality? How can we understand transnational Black feminist theory as a means of resistance and solidarity building? What do these methodologies look like in practice? How do changing notions of sexuality, gender, and nation travel across borders, and how might Black feminism create opportunities for collective organizing?

Conveners: Jazmin Maço and Rukimani PV

Contemporary Art in Latin America

This student-led working group examines how contemporary Latin American artists, curators, and exhibitions address urgent issues such as race, coloniality, gender, and environmental crises. Through selected readings, exhibition catalogs, and case studies — including the 35th São Paulo Bienal and the MASP Histórias series — we will discuss key developments shaping Latin American Art today. Guest curators and scholars will join select sessions to share insights from their work and experiences. The group fosters critical reflection, dialogue, and an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how contemporary art responds to and challenges the complexities of our current world.

Conveners: María Molano Parrado and Mateus Sanches Duarte

Critical Making Working Group

The Critical Making Working Group (CMWG) is dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary practice, supporting artistic performance and development within an academic and professional environment. As scholars increasingly aim to transform their research into aesthetic and political interventions, CMWG offers a supportive community for feedback, co-working, collaborative learning, and curating. Participants pursue both personal and collaborative projects, and throughout the semester, we support one another in reaching our goals and sharing our work with a bigger community outside of Duke. To facilitate ongoing communication and collaboration, we use a Discord channel and cloud-based storage to share resources.

Conveners: Sang Chi Liu, Qifeng Cheng, Erich Barganier, Cat Gambel, Hugo Idarraga franco, and Rachel Tay

Critical Science and Technology Studies (CSTS) working group

The Critical Science and Technology Studies (CSTS) working group will convene students across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences to critically examine relationships between science and technology and the humanities. Though interdisciplinary eﬀorts to engage the sciences and humanities have occasionally tended to export the vocabulary and methods of the sciences onto the humanities, these disciplines are not often in mutually valued conversation with each other. Conscious of the way that CSTS has engaged more thoroughly with certain sciences (namely organic/embodied sciences like environmental science, biology, medicine, and digital technologies), we will attend to STEM areas that are under-theorized or perceived to be less amenable to critique. We welcome wide-ranging theoretical analysis, including literary theory, decolonial studies, feminist theory, aﬀect theory, and ethnography. The CSTS working group will be structured initially as a reading group.

Conveners: Zoë Webb-Mack and Britt Edelen

Digital Culture and Literature Working Group

The Digital Culture and Literature working group is exploring the contemporary landscape of literature and communal literary practices online. Graduate students in this group come from a variety of disciplines to discuss digital platform ecologies, the present status of literature and culture in the marketplace, and the unstable boundaries between public and private, author and celebrity, person and character, artwork and product, value and virality. We are guided by a few questions: What future does literature have in the Information Age? How has celebrity shaped contemporary expectations for literature? Has mass connectivity changed our definitions of “high” and “low” culture? We will meet once a month to discuss a work of contemporary literature, or a contemporary cultural object, and we aim to take seriously the vernacular communities and practices surrounding these works. All students are welcome to join.

Conveners: Julia Gordon, Cassandra Luca, and Ananya Mohan

Digital Graveyards: Unearthing Palestine’s Archive

The Digital Graveyards Working Group seeks to collectively work on the application of archival theory and praxis through a digital humanities lens with an emphasis and focus on Palestine, but not limited to additional archives. This working group can expect to engage in concepts of digital hauntology, necropolitics, archival production, assemblage/identity theory, and digital curation. Our guiding questions are: What does it mean to bear witness to genocide within the digital? (As Deborah Thomas asks) What does it mean to be human — politically — in the wake of the plantation? How does the digital offer us tools to defy the logics of settler-colonialist violence in the afterlife of Palestinian martyrs?

Participants of the working group can also expect to be contributors and researchers of Palestine’s Digital Graveyard Research project, a multi-media project convened by a group of archivists, computer scientists, and designers as a means to archive martyrs of the ongoing genocide in Gaza through a black feminist praxis. This includes adding to the digital Twitter archive and reading text materials in conjunction with the site’s work. Participants can also expect to curate a digital exhibition based on collections from the archive to be added to the site.

Conveners: Jazmin Maço, Art and Rukimani PV

Gender and Ecologies

The Gender and Ecologies Working Group is broadly interested in productive and reproductive labor as a way to bridge the fields of gender studies and environmental studies. How does the embodiment or contestation of gendered roles and expectations shape how we access, understand, and influence our environment? We will look at recent and emerging works that interrogates representations of women and nature, narratives of gendered landscapes, and the discursive entanglement of environmental humanities and ecofeminism. The group will meet monthly and engage with a variety of materials including theoretical texts, fiction, documentary films, and multimedia. The Gender and Ecologies reading group welcomes perspectives from a wide range of regional and disciplinary backgrounds. Themes such as gendered labor, environmental justice, and ecological imaginaries are inherently global and take on different forms across cultural and historical settings.

Conveners: Ananya Mohan, Mingkang Hao, Anqi Zheng, and Yixuan Jiang

Global Asian Circuits: Words and Work

How is contemporary Asia circulated within a rapidly globalizing world? This working group takes two keywords—words and work—as its entry point into thinking about the idea of Global Asia. We attend to words and work in their multiplicities: novels and poetry alongside bureaucratic documents and employment contracts; the “high-skilled” work of literary translation alongside the “low-skilled” work of temporary migrant workers in factories and plantations. We aim to foster a collaborative, interdisciplinary space; our sessions will consist of reading groups on the topics above and workshopping works-in-progress.

Conveners: Jing Hao Liong and Jaeyeon Yoo

Historical Materialism: New Directions

Reflecting on its contemporary relevance and exploring its future trajectories, this graduate working group seeks to critically engage with current, interdisciplinary research in Marxist theory and historical materialism. As ecological, political, and social crises intensify, Marxism and historical materialism allow us to orient ourselves to the vertiginous, social, political, economic, and cultural forces driving these global challenges and shaping our collective future. This group will focus on the future of critical thought by examining how historical materialism might evolve—or perhaps has already evolved—to address new challenges, especially in relation to Marxist feminism, Black internationalism, Marxist ecology, and political economy. These frameworks will guide our group’s readings and discussions on adapting and expanding historical materialism in response to contemporary shifts in global capitalism, race relations, gender politics, and ecological degradation. Open to all graduate students, this working group is particularly suited for students interested in critical thought and global Marxism(s).

Conveners: Anthony Ballas, Ethan Barrett, Cassandra Luca, Alba Mas-Sala, and Skylar Xu

Latin America and Asia: Orientalisms from Columbus to Today

Upon his arrival in Latin America in 1492, Christopher Columbus believed that he had reached Asia. Since then, orientalism has been a lens through which colonizers, imperialists, and authoritarians have contemplated the region’s peoples and cultures. This working group will track the presence of and changes in orientalist thought in Latin America. Our investigation will be Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific in scope and feature works written by Latin American, Asian, Asian-Latin American, and North American scholars as well as films and literary texts. We will meet bi-weekly. Key questions include: What historical and cultural factors have contributed to changes in orientalist thought in Latin America and any differences in its manifestation when compared with Europe and North America? How has orientalism played an important role in major artistic and literary movements? How have Latin American scholars departed from Edward Said’s Orientalism? And how do orientalisms continue to surface today?

Conveners: Teddy Romeyn and Grant Azevedo Beleza-Schutzman

Outside Poetics x Poetics Outside

We explore how poetics can enact practices between, or out of, different styles of study. We read poetry and “poetic scholarship” (broadly defined) with an Earthly and sonic focus, while attuning our critical attention to the ways poetry reaches outside of academic paddocks. ‘Outside Poetics’—through music and art with special attention given to various publics under ontological siege—foregrounds improvisation and gathering. ‘Poetics Outside’ means we plan to curate community-facing programming through events with peers from lands near and far. Transposing poetic etiquette and hospitality, the working group’s philosophy is not postural ethics, but a poethical praxis, a way of getting together to study outside (of) conventional scripts. Through experiment and interactive collaboration, we hope to encourage an exchange amidst the creative, the critical, and the communal.

Conveners: Ethan Barrett, Maryn Gardner, and Jay Butler

Palestine Studies Working Group

The Palestine Studies Working Group explores deep intellectual discussion around the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its history through literature, theory, cultural studies, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and related disciplines. This group seeks to foster conversation beyond the introductory discussion of Palestine so often necessary in American institutions. With the support of the Franklin Humanities Institute in 2025–2026, our third year of group study, we will turn in particular to new releases in Palestine Studies, understanding Palestine as the kernel of what is made possible by critical thought in the humanities and of the convergence between scholarship and activism. We welcome students without significant background in Middle East Studies, though such readers may need to search out additional material on their own, to join us in this sustained study of scholars committed to Palestine and Middle East Studies.

Convenors: Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan and Katelyn Zeser

Politics of Speculation in, of, and from the Global South

Our working group explores intersections of speculation, futurity, and power in the Global South. . Traditionally understood as a financial practice aimed at capital accumulation, speculation also operates as a broader social, political, and ecological force that shapes aspirations, vulnerabilities, and governance structures. By critically engaging with speculative practices across different contexts, we seek to expand understandings of how speculation functions beyond markets, influencing labor, environment, and everyday life. Drawing from case studies—including Chile’s Carbon Neutrality 2050 policy, jadeite extraction in Myanmar/Thailand/China, sports betting economies in Colombia, speculative fiction in the global Black diaspora, and FinTech in Ghana—we engage critically with theory, place-based knowledge, and ethics. By bringing together diverse perspectives, Politics of Speculation will create opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange, fostering critical inquiry into how speculation structures knowledge, power, and possibility in the Global South.

Conveners: Federico Dupont Bernal, Jan Koplow, Anqi Yan, Hakeem Watson, and Yuanwei Zong

Reading Literature in Translation

This interdisciplinary graduate working group will discuss the status of contemporary literature in translation. We are guided by the following questions: What are the terms on which we engage with translated literature? What pathways do translated literary works have available to reach the U.S. market? What role does the cultural hegemony of English and the U.S. play in shaping literature around the globe and how do we see that play out in the current market of translated literature? We will meet bi-weekly to discuss recent works in translation, prioritizing those from the Global South and non-colonial languages. We will read these texts alongside articles that problematize and engage with the colonial dynamics that underpin translated literature; we hope to engage the words of translators themselves — especially translators of color and heritage-language translators. We will also collaborate with the literary journal Reading in Translation.

Conveners: Barbara Halla, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, and Jaeyeon Yoo

Reading Stuart Hall

There is no shortage of urgent political and intellectual questions to confront at this current historical conjuncture. What kinds of tools and strategies are needed to navigate this moment? This graduate working group takes up the writings of Stuart Hall (1932–2014), one of the twentieth century’s most influential public thinkers on culture, identity, history, and power. The group brings together students from across disciplines to read and discuss a curated selection of Hall’s essays, alongside some of the thinkers with whom he was in dialogue. Hall’s work models how to connect historical analysis to present political formations. His essays invite us to see crises as both destructive and generative, moments of rupture that close off certain possibilities while opening others. By reading Hall now, we ask how his ideas can help us reckon with the conjuncture we inhabit: its crises of survival, knowledge, and power, and its potential for new ways of understanding and relating to the world. With the recent publication of his collected essays by Duke University Press, this is a particularly timely occasion to return to Hall’s writings.

Conveners: Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, Chadd Heller, and Jax Shirey

Resonant Territories: Sound, Environment, and Worlds

Resonant Territories is a student-led working group that brings together the initiatives of Beyond Soundscapes and Mountain Sound Studies to explore the intersections of sound, environment, and multiple ways of navigating life and worlds. Through a combination of reading discussions, critical listening workshops, guest speakers, and field recording sessions, we examine how sonic environments mediate ecological entanglements and shape cultural imaginaries. By situating the multiple ways of conceiving life and worlds as key sites for exploring sonic ecologies and archiving practices, the group integrates theoretical reflection with practice-based engagement in field recording, sound mapping, and auditory ethnography. Our activities will culminate in a collaborative sound installation or composition, materializing insights from the year’s work. Open to graduate students across disciplines, Resonant Territories fosters interdisciplinary exchange and creative experimentation, contributing to broader conversations on race, health, climate, and sonic heritage.

Conveners: Trisha Liao, Maako Shiratori, Fayrouz Kaddal, Haotian Wang, Joseph O’Connell, and Jan Koplow

South Asia Working Group

The South Asia Working Group is a space for students and researchers with a regional focus on South Asia. We are committed to cultivating a dynamic intellectual community that transcends traditional academic boundaries, fostering a rich environment for scholarly exchange and collaborative inquiry. The region has immense potential for collaborative work which often gets overshadowed by political conflicts. And therefore, as South Asian scholars we must make the effort of curating spaces for mutual learning and intellectual fellowship among peers.

The activities of the group will include guest speakers on a range of topics affecting all South Asian countries. We will host lightening talks where researchers in the triangle area will give short presentations of their work to the group. Other informal gatherings like documentary screenings and mixers will be held. We welcome all graduate and undergraduate students who are working or are interested in the region.

Conveners: Tanvi Ravel Mehta, Shifa Nouman, Fizza Suhel

Transnational Queer/Trans/Disability Studies

This working group seeks to create an interdisciplinary space to explore the relational formations of queerness, transness, and disability through a diasporic and transnational lens. We will examine how histories of colonialism, nationalism, and migration have shaped experiences of gender, sexuality, and disability across different geographies of power. Our topics may include but are not limited to: transness and non-normative gender/sexual subjectivities in transnational contexts; colonialism and debility; queer/crip/trans care work; curative violence and anti-cure politics; queer/crip ecologies and intoxication; queer diaspora; queer political theory and trans philosophy; trans side affects and crip feelings; madness and sanism, etc. We welcome participants whose interests and commitments resonate with the working group to join.

Conveners: Kexuan Liu, Jaeyeon Yun, Sang Chi Liu

Uncertainty and Knowledge

The Uncertainty and Knowledge Working Group explores how knowledge emerges through practices that embrace chance, risk, play, speculation, and intuition. Drawing from divination, gambling, gaming, and sensorial translation, we highlight feminist, queer, and cross-cultural epistemologies where uncertainty becomes a generative force of creativity, resistance, and world-making. Our format combines discussion and experiential learning: weekly meetings feature readings in anthropology and game studies alongside participatory sessions such as listening, gaming, or ritual-based practices. Members also share insights from their own fieldwork bringing situated perspectives into dialogue. By engaging with speculative and ritual-based forms of knowledge, we reflect on the ethical dimensions of learning across traditions, critique dominant epistemologies, and experiment with collaborative projects that reimagine uncertainty as both method and metaphor.

Conveners: Sang Chi Liu, Kexuan Liu, Yu-An Kuo, Trisha Liao, Joanna Marbaniang, Chi Kuan, Ting-Yui Cai, Sayaha Takahashi

Weimar Study Group

Born from the ruins of the German Empire at the end of the First World War and destroyed by the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor on January 30, 1933, the short-lived Weimar Republic was one of the more sensational experiments in democracy and democratic fragility. Weimar Germany was also a foundational period for the history of literature and philosophy. The Weimar Study Group is a year-long reading group that discusses some of the major philosophic and political thinkers to come out this hectic period. Authors we will discuss include Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, and Thomas Mann and their progeny. We are also looking at the wider cultural context of music, cinema, visual art, and political history as we trace the upheavals of thought that would lay the groundwork for contemporary humanities and social sciences.

Conveners: Brogan Hannon, Mina Moon-Black, Daniel Orr, Joseph Rodriguez, and Matias Sur

2024-25 Graduate Working Groups

African Thought and Media

This group explores media as existing at the intersection of thought and thing. We use different media (digital, print, music, film, etc.) to inquire into the ways media aesthetics, epistemologies, and ethics capture quotidian relations to matter and asymmetrical experiences of racial capitalism, while reminding us of the enduring geopolitics of knowledge production. Our interests in discussing lived experiences through the inseparability of African thought and media blur gaps between theory and praxis. The group approaches both as complementary forms of knowledge that provide us with crucial perspectives on not just blackness and global entanglement as set in motion by coloniality but also Africa’s place within it.

The working group also intersects the African Thought and Media (ATM) Project, a public lecture and panel series that brings scholars and practitioners of African sonic, digital, and visual media to Duke.

ATM 1: Adeshina Afolayan – February 13, 2024

ATM 2: Alexandria Eregbu – October 10, 2024

Conveners: Damilare Bello and Kasyoka Mwanzia

Beyond Soundscapes

This working group is a student-led space for Duke humanities and social science graduate students working on topics in sound studies and the environmental humanities. Our intellectual agenda consists of rethinking the acoustic relations between humans and the “more-than-human”; critically reviewing histories of nature-and-sound theory; challenging the anthropocentric and nature-exclusive conception of “environment”; and questioning the ways ecological thought continues to rely on nature-culture dualism.

Our group activities will include reading and discussing foundational and emerging literatures on sound and environment, workshopping participants’ research-in-progress, and experimenting with listening as a shared critical practice. Additionally, we will establish collaborations with other Graduate Working Groups, particularly the “Mountain and Sound Studies” GWG.

We welcome Ph.D. and MA students with research interests in fields such as anthropology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, performance studies, environmental history, ecology, environmental social sciences, film studies, and romance studies.

Conveners: Yu-An Kuo, Tisha Liao, Joseph O’Connell, and Jan Koplow

Black Feminist Working Group

Conveners: Jazmin Maço, Art, Art History, & Visual Studies, Ph.D.; Rukimani PV, Literature, Ph.D

Contemporary Poetics Working Group

The Contemporary Poetics Working Group is comprised of graduate students from across the humanities interested in developing an interdisciplinary conversation centered on contemporary poetry and poetics. The working group seeks to emphasize experimental literary writing as a unique mode of thought that engages and expands scholarly fields of inquiry.

Working group sessions are organized in tandem with Solarities, a public poetry reading series bringing established and emerging visiting writers to Duke.

Solarities 1: Roberto Tejada and Asiya Wadud — March 30, 2023

Solarities 2: Kimberly Alidio and Stacy Szymaszek — November 16, 2023

Solarities 3: Alice Notley, Hoa Nguyen, and Dale Martin Smith — April 4, 2024

Solarities 4: Will Alexander and Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola — November 14, 2024

Solarities 5: Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and fahima ife – March 27, 2025

Conveners: Michael Cavuto and Tessa Bolsover

Critical Making Working Group

The Critical Making Working Group (CMWG) is dedicated to cultivating interdisciplinary practice, enabling academic professionals to engage in creative and digital skill development. As scholars increasingly seek to evaluate and transform their work into aesthetic and political interventions, CMWG offers a supportive community for feedback and collaborative learning. Participants explore topics like Digital Archives, Machine Learning, and 3D Modeling through monthly meetings, weekly workshops, and a final exhibition. To facilitate ongoing communication and project collaboration, resources are shared via a Discord channel and cloud-based storage.

Conveners: Sang Chi Liu, Cat Gambel, Hugo Idarraga Franco, Rachel Tay, Kate Alexendrite, Elizabeth Brown, and Indigo Cook

Democracy Working Group

The Democracy Working Group will look at recent scholarship in democratic theory. In doing so, we consider the relationship between normative and empirical work. The working group will bring together undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs of different disciplines.

Conveners: Joseph Rodriguez and Matias Sur

Digital Culture and Literature Working Group

Our working group will be thinking through and reflecting on digital ecologies, broadly conceived, and their interaction with contemporary literature and culture. We are also interested in digital humanities and computational methodologies as a way of understanding the influence of the digital.

Conveners: Hannah Jorgensen and Julia Gordon

Digital Graveyards: Unearthing Palestine’s Archive

Conveners: Jazmin Maço, Art, Art History, & Visual Studies, Ph.D.; Rukimani PV, Literature, Ph.D

Madness: History and Critique

In Madness and Civilization (1961), Michel Foucault defines madness as an empty signifier, essentially denoting nothing but un-reason, or the absence of proper form. He argues that “reason's proper forms are historically contingent and socially constructed.” In other words, for Foucault, what it means to be mad depends entirely on social – and, of course, political – constructions of reason. Our FHI working group will explore madness’ contingencies through interdisciplinary readings from historians, philosophers, literary critics, and psychiatrists. We will ground our discussions in the following questions: How has the meaning of madness changed throughout history, and how do we understand it in the contemporary moment? How and why is mental status pathologized? How do different forms of hegemony shape who is perceived as mad? Does literature offer us a view of madness that is otherwise foreclosed — is it possible to write madness?

Conveners: Effie Harrington and Courtney Klashman

Mountain and Sound Studies

This is a space to build sound archives related to mountains. From mountains, especially of global or planetary South and East, we seek to co-listen to our “local” voices such as, but not limited to, migrant and refugee oral histories, vernacular music and dance, and indigenous environment.

Mountain Studies and Sound Studies since the 1980’s guided us to rethink mountains as a bridge in sharing and embracing different experiences over how history is narrated. Recent inspirations include HIST 515: Oral History Methods (Prof. Wesley Hogan 2023), our collaborator “After and Beyond Soundscape: A Critical Sound and Environment Working Group” and a publication of “Remapping Sound Studies” group.

We have monthly performances and workshops for presenting our sound archives-in-progress to connect with each participant’s scholarly, artistic, and community-engaged works. Anyone is welcome to join.

Conveners: Maako Shiratori, Thang Lian, Trisha Liao, and Ziwen Liu

Palestine Studies Working Group

The Palestine Studies Working Group aims to foster deeper intellectual discussion around the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its history through literature, theory, cultural studies, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and related disciplines. In times of crisis such as the current genocide in Gaza and related bombardment and attacks in the West Bank and Lebanon, we support the importance of introductory teach-ins and learning opportunities on Palestine and the history of the occupation. While this work is crucial, this group seeks to foster conversation beyond the introductory discussion of Palestine so often necessary in American institutions. With the support of the Franklin Humanities Institute in 2024–2025, we seek to move deeper into the intersections of the construction of race in Israel/Palestine and the Middle East more broadly, as this is a complex, yet often undertheorized, component of Middle East Studies. We will also incorporate a focus on gender, sexuality, religion, and environmental impacts in the region. We welcome students without significant background in Middle East Studies, though such readers may need to search out additional material on their own, to join us in this sustained study of scholars committed to Palestine and Middle East Studies.

Convenors: Zeena Yasmine Fuleihan and Allison Wattenbarger

Psychoanalysis Now!

Psychoanalytic discourses have come a long way since Freud. Through confrontations with “other” discourses — of race, gender, biology, technology, and ecology, and beyond — the discipline has expanded past its original purview of sex(uality). These encounters have exposed how these “other” discourses were already present and internal to psychoanalysis: extimate, to use Lacan’s term. The Psychoanalysis Now! Working Group will explore these entanglements as central to contemporary psychoanalytic thought.

Through our readings, we will examine how recent developments in gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, Black studies, and environmental studies present problems to and of psychoanalysis, as well as how psychoanalysis, in the clinic and university, changes in response. To do so, we will turn to recent psychoanalytic theoretical works that stage internal interventions by focusing on questions concerning the environment, race, biology, technology, and gender. Students of all levels of familiarity (or unfamiliarity) are welcome to attend.

Conveners: Britton Edelen and Katherine Carithers

Reading Literature in Translation

Conveners: Barbara Halla, Barbara Ofosu-Somuah, and Jaeyeon Yoo

Writing for Publics

This working group provides advice, structure, and support for graduate students interested in writing for non-academic and general audiences. The group primarily focuses on how to write and publish op-eds and articles for popular magazines and news websites, although other forms of public writing (i.e. substacks, video essays, children’s books etc.) will also be explored and discussed. Key questions the working group grapples with include: How do we use our scholarly expertise to write for public audiences, and what distinguishes this writing from academic writing? What is the value of writing for the public? How do we identify potential places to publish our writing? How do we pitch our op-eds and essays for publication? What risks should we consider when publishing for a wider audience?

Conveners: Shreya Maini and Claire Rostov

2023-24 Graduate Working Groups

African Thought and Media: Coloniality, Ecologies, Forms

This group engages the materiality of media as existing at the intersection of thought and thing. We use different media (social/popular, digital, print, music, film, etc.) to explore how aesthetics, epistemologies, and politics capture asymmetrical experiences of racial and extractive capitalism, provoke questions of ethics, and remind us of the enduring geopolitics of knowledge production. Our interests in discussing lived experiences through the inseparability of African thought and media blur gaps between theory and praxis. The group approaches African theory and praxis of media as complementary forms of knowledge that provide us with crucial perspectives on not just blackness and global entanglement as set in motion by coloniality but also Africa’s place within, and in relation to, both.

Conveners: Damilare Bello and Kasyoka Mwanzia

Contemporary Poetics Working Group

Working group sessions are organized in tandem with Solarities, a public poetry reading series bringing established and emerging visiting writers to Duke.

Solarities 1: Roberto Tejada and Asiya Wadud — March 30, 2023

Solarities 2: Kimberly Alidio and Stacy Szymaszek — November 16, 2023

Solarities 3: Alice Notley, Hoa Nguyen, and Dale Martin Smith — April 4, 2024

Conveners: Michael Cavuto and Tessa Bolsover

Remembering COVID from Below in China and the Diaspora

As the Chinese government continues to portray its COVID response as a victorious “People’s War” that bolsters the superiority of China’s one-party state system, individual narratives one encounters on social media and private exchanges detail the countless atrocities caused by authoritarian excess throughout the pandemic. Despite the state’s swift efforts of curating “the correct collective memory,” Chinese people have found ways to preserve their own stories in the face of censorship and propaganda. In this working group, we will work towards a public-facing, interactive digital archive to highlight some of these stories. We will use this space to explore digital tools and comb through the oral history, grassroot media art, and digital ephemera we gathered in the past three years. We hope to showcase the multitemporal and all-encompassing impact that Covid and its subsequent “zero-Covid” movement have had on individuals, and their creative and resourceful ways of responding.

Conveners: Faye Ma, Yidi Zheng, Lingyu Wang (UNC), Huiyin Zhou, and Miranda Zhong

Psychoanalysis Now!

Psychoanalytic discourses have come a long way since Freud. Through confrontations with “other” discourses — of race, gender, biology, technology, and ecology, and beyond — the discipline has expanded past its original purview of sex(uality). These encounters have exposed how these “other” discourses were already present and internal to psychoanalysis: extimate, to use Lacan’s term. The Psychoanalysis Now! Working Group will explore these entanglements as central to contemporary psychoanalytic thought.

Conveners: Britt Edelen and Katherine Carithers

East Asia/Asian Diaspora Studies Working Group

This working group is a student-led space for humanities and social sciences graduate students working on topics related to East Asia and/or East Asian diaspora at Duke University. PhD and MA students at any stage are invited to share resources, workshop projects, network, and engage in conversations. Launched in Spring 2022, this working group is committed to an interdisciplinary, transnational, and translingual approach; we seek to rethink the relations between ethnic studies and area studies, challenging the US-centrism in knowledge production and scholarly political engagement. You can subscribe to the EADS Working Group listserv through https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/info/eads for more information and updates.

Conveners: Mariko Azuma, Faye Ma, and Jaeyeon Yoo

Digital Culture and Literature Working Group

Convener: Hannah Jorgensen

Black Feminist Theory Working Group

The BFT Working Group seeks to collectively engage in a deeper understanding of Black feminist theory and practice. We seek to think critically across borders, with a focus that includes but goes beyond the United States with an emphasis on Global South geographies in Latin America, the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa. In doing so, this working group seeks to expand theoretical conceptualizations of blackness by situating black struggles, resistance, and history within a transnational framework.

Conveners: Barbara Ofosu-Somuah and Rukimani PV

Liberation Theology

Liberation Theology began in Latin America and the United States during the 1960s. Latin American liberation theology aimed to free the poor from economic oppression and Black liberation theology, from racial oppression. Since then, liberation theology has flourished. The field has adopted more perspectives, leading to more inclusive and insightful visions of liberation. The reading group will explore works from around the world encompassing a range of theologies that fall within the liberation framework: queer theology, postcolonial theology, feminist/womanist/mujerista theology, Black theology, and Asian theology.

Our goal is to make these theologies of liberation intelligible within a secular humanist framework. As David Harvey notes at the end of his book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the hope for an anti-capitalist future lies in an alliance between secular humanisms and religious liberation theologies. Theologies of liberation can enhance the struggles against capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and other oppressive regimes.

Conveners: Natalie Gasparowicz, Devin Creed

Duke South Asia Working Group

The Duke South Asia Working Group is a network for early career researchers of South Asia which organizes a monthly reading group. This platform will offer an intellectual space to an increasing number of scholars working on South Asia in the Humanities and Social Sciences departments at Duke and beyond with an aim to encourage an interdisciplinary conversation. The current centers and departments at Duke do not have any such space to offer–especially one that cuts across disciplines. In doing so, this working group addresses the long felt need for a formalized and dedicated community to study the region of South Asia and promote scholarly work in this field led by graduate students. The working group will convene around a broad theme each semester, which will provide a framework for readings and discussions.

Conveners: Avrati Bhatnagar and Archit Guha

Critical Machine Learning Studies

The Critical Machine Learning Studies Working Group at Duke University addresses the wide-reaching influence of machine learning (ML) on society. ML's pervasive role in data collection and analysis has prompted concerns and innovative interdisciplinary approaches to these issues. Despite Duke's interest in learning algorithms, there is a lack of comprehensive courses and events focusing on ML's societal impact. This project aims to consolidate existing academic discussions, ongoing research, and Duke's interest in ML's political and aesthetic analysis from arts and humanities. It fosters networking, bringing together faculty and students, and seeks to establish a stable academic group for ML studies within Duke. The workinggroup distinguishes itself with a critical approach, exploring ML beyond its technical aspects and linking its emergence to broader historical, theoretical, and political contexts. It aims to promote ethical technological progress, addressing power structures influencing ML development and fostering dialogue between technical and critical perspectives.

Conveners: Sang Chi Liu, Kelsey Brod, Kate Alexandrite, and Hugo Idarraga

Platonic Questions, Contemporary Problems

How do we think about the injustices we see around us? How do we conceive of climate change, racial injustice, and sexism as part of a larger structure? If we seek a just system in spite of these problems, what do we mean by justice? We investigate these questions in "Platonic Questions, Contemporary Problems"! Together we read and discuss Plato’s Republic, and tackle its related questions of justice and injustice, good and evil. Our interdisciplinary working group excavates the rich connections between the Republic and contemporary problems of local and global (in)justices. Our working group will culminate with a keynote address from professor Melissa Lane (Princeton) and the chance for participants to workshop new ideas that emerge from encounters with the Republic.

Conveners: Ivy Flessen, Daniel Orr, and Ben Moon-Black

Food Studies Working Group

Bringing together works of literature, ethnography, music, and theory, this interdisciplinary working group explores the consumption and production of food as a practice of community-building, memory, and cultural production. Attending to Sylvia Wynter’s articulation of a new science of the word that incorporates narrative storytelling with the study of nature through scientific knowledge, we are interested in the capacity of foodways to provide biological and emotional nourishment. Therefore, our meetings will include space for discussion, conversation, cooking, and eating together. Our meetings will be guided by group interest and are open to all.

Conveners: Dray Denson and Elly Veloria

2021-22 Graduate Working Groups

Challenging Borders: Representations of the Global South Working Group

The interest in Global South as a critical concept has risen steadily in the last decade in the United States, as more and more universities have dedicated courses, centers, and whole departments to its research. However, centuries before, writers, artists, poets, and activists already conceptualized this epistemological shift from their geopolitical positions without using this term. This working group examines the emergence of the South's concept from its representation in literary and visual works produced on and from the Global South. To this end, we would like to open up an interdisciplinary discussion across languages and philosophical/methodological traditions on topics like diaspora and migrations to explore its origins and development as a field of study.

We will study how a concept such as the Global South allows us to understand the ongoing debate about colonial histories and globalization. Global South studies allow us to go beyond national borders and disciplinary boundaries to build new geographies and connect previously separated areas such as the Mediterranean, Latin American, and Transpacific studies. Only in this way we can learn to look beyond conventional patterns of migration and create significant connections between geopolitical sites that have not been explored before. We believe that paying attention to these spaces and communities through an innovative way of connecting them can help envision a new form of global connectivity. We see the erasure of geohistorical relations, populations, and origins as a form of latent violence, perpetrated through a rigid division between fields of study that prevents a holistic account of Southern dynamics and debates. Accordingly, this working group's final objective is to acknowledge that the South is not a mere object of study, but a subject producing knowledge about itself.

Conveners: Cristina Carnemolla and Ninel Valderrama Negron

2020-21 Graduate Working Groups

Latin America: Theory and Narrative in Present Tense

The emergence of cultural studies in the Latin American field, particularly its subalternist iteration beginning in the 1990s, opened new horizons for the study of mass or popular cultures and the corresponding effort to forge emancipatory politics. The trenchant debates that followed the emergence of the field, while in many instances productive, have arguably sedimented perceived divisions between “theory,” “literature,” and “[popular] culture” as modes of scholarly and political engagement.

This working group proposes debate on the field’s present and future, with an aim at overcoming the limitations imposed by enshrined disciplinary and methodological boundaries. To these ends, we will discuss both recent scholarly texts and the literary and cultural objects they foreground, with the aim of revisiting and revising established frameworks as well as hypothesizing and experimenting with new ones.

Central to these discussions will be the relationship between scholarship, aesthetics, and politics today, particularly in light of the intensification of concerns such as migration, environmental deterioration, narcotrafficking, financialization, militarization, and the withering of the traditional nation-state under neoliberalism. Latin America, no doubt, assumes a central position in the context of these global processes. We look to debate the scholarly, cultural, and theoretical tools necessary for apprehending them.

As part of the working group’s activities, we will invite scholars to present and discuss recent work, in collaboration with both the Franklin Humanities Institute as well as related academic departments and centers.

Conveners: Ian Erickson-Kery and Lucas Lopes

Unearthing Duke Forest

The ecological history of Duke Forest is embedded within the human history of plantation agriculture, fueled by violent chattel slavery. Hallmark insights about river ecology, biodiversity, community succession, and climate change have come from research in Duke Forest, but what are the conditions that have allowed such research to take place? How does the historical context of the land and people on it affect knowledge production? What stake do researchers have in that history? Through the creation of a public outdoors exhibit at the Robeson Mill site at Duke Forest, Unearthing Duke Forest hopes to highlight those peoples that have been displaced, removed, or expunged from the Forest’s archive.

Convened by doctoral students Kathleen Burns (English), Renata Poulton Kamakura (Nicholas School of the Environment), and Anita Simha (Biology), Unearthing Duke Forest began in Fall 2020 as an FHI Graduate Working Group. UDF is an interdisciplinary endeavor to investigate the broader historical conditions through which research in Duke Forest has been rendered possible. In Spring 2021, the project was awarded a Duke Endowment Reckoning with Race, Racism, and the History of the American South grant by the Office of the Provost, with Prof. Kathleen Donohue (Biology) serving as lead faculty PI. In Summer 2022, UDF will sponsor a Story+ project with the goal of creating a digital companion to the outdoors exhibit at Robeson Mill.