The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute (DHRC@FHI) brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, staff and students to promote new understandings about global human rights issues, placing special emphasis on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, income inequality, the environment, and artistic responses in teaching, programming and outreach. The DHRC@FHI is home to the undergraduate Human Rights Certificate, which offers students an in-depth and rigorous interdisciplinary study of human rights history, theory and practice, cultivating life-long learners and engaged citizens who have a deep and nuanced understanding of human rights.
Forum @ FHI, founded in 2013 as the Forum for Scholars and Publics, provides a space where scholars and various publics — local, national, and global — can interact and intersect to generate greater exchange between the university and the broader world. Through programming and long-term collaborations with artists, journalists, filmmakers, scholars, activists, organizers, entrepreneurs, curators, and more, the Forum advocates for the dual and complementary roles in society of community expertise and scholarly knowledge.
Created and hosted by James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African and African American Studies Mark Anthony Neal, Left of Black features interviews with Black Studies scholars in a broadly accessible web video format. Originally based at the John Hope Franklin Center, LoB has been produced at the FHI since 2019. The prolific series was honored with a Webby nomination in 2023.
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 with 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.