Faculty Book Manuscript Workshops
Faculty Book Manuscript Workshops provide a structure for generating constructive, informed criticism on near-final book manuscripts, at a moment in the writing process when authors can most effectively utilize such feedback. The program's goal is to transform already excellent scholarly projects into superior published works. The program allows faculty to invite two experts in their field and an acquisitions editor from a major scholarly press to campus. During a half-day workshop, these guests present their thoughts on the manuscript, followed by a response from the author and discussion with a broader group of invited faculty from Duke and other universities in the Triangle. The program is open to regular-rank faculty at all ranks in the humanities, arts, and interpretive social sciences, regardless of seniority - but Assistant Professors will receive priority consideration.
We usually issue a call for proposals for workshops twice a year, early in the fall and spring semesters. Sign up for the FHI newsletter to receive news and opportunities, including CFPs.
Scroll down to explore books published by "alumni" of the program. To view a list of all award recipients since the inception of the program, click here.
Featured Publications
Princeton University Press, 2023
In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. The polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation-states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty... read more about Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East »
Duke University Press, 2022
In Lifelines Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospitals, narrating the stories of the patients, providers, and families who experience and care for traumatic injuries due to widespread traffic accidents. He traces trauma’s moves after the accident: from scenes of road and railway injuries to ambulance interiors; through emergency triage, surgery, and intensive care; and from the morgue for patients who do not survive into the homes of those who do. These pathways reveal how trauma shifts inequalities, infrastructures, and institutions through the lives and labors of clinical spaces. Solomon contends that medicine itself must be understood in terms of lifelines: patterns of embodied... read more about Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma »
University Press of Florida, 2022
Originating in the Black Atlantic world as a fusion of dance and martial art, capoeira was a marginalized practice for much of its history. Today it is globally popular. This ethnographic memoir weaves together the history of capoeira, recent transformations in the practice, and personal insights from author Katya Wesolowski’s thirty years of experience as a capoeirista. Capoeira Connections follows Wesolowski’s journey from novice to instructor while drawing on her decades of research as an anthropologist in Brazil, Angola, Europe, and the United States. In a story of local practice and global flow, Wesolowski offers an intimate portrait of the game and what it means in people’s lives. She reveals camaraderie and conviviality in the... read more about Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion »
Cambridge University Press, 2021
Bringing together a vivid array of analog and non-traditional sources, including colonial archives, newspaper reports, literature, oral histories, and interviews, Buried in the Red Dirt tells a story of life, death, reproduction and missing bodies and experiences during and since the British colonial period in Palestine. Using transnational feminist reading practices of existing and new archives, the book moves beyond authorized frames of collective pain and heroism. Looking at their day-to-day lives, where Palestinians suffered most from poverty, illness, and high rates of infant and child mortality, Frances Hasso's book shows how ideologically and practically, racism and eugenics shaped British colonialism and Zionist settler-colonialism... read more about Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction, and Death in Modern Palestine »
Wesleyan University Press, 2021
Funding Bodies is the first scholarly study of the National Endowment for the Arts to focus specifically on dance. It departs from a choreographic question: How have federal grant guidelines rewarded specific patterns of dance practice and production? Drawing upon archival documentation of NEA narratives, program eligibility guidelines, and standards of evaluation as well as testimony from past and present insiders, Wilbur's work theorizes endowment as an economic and practical struggle by people with differential power and competing investments in production and professionalization of dance. With a wealth of detail and previously untold stories, this institutional history brings clarity to the complex processes that underlie the... read more about Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts »
All Workshop Publications
In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not,... read more about Modern Arab Kingship: Remaking the Ottoman Political Order in the Interwar Middle East »
Originating in the Black Atlantic world as a fusion of dance and martial art, capoeira was a... read more about Capoeira Connections: A Memoir in Motion »
In Lifelines Harris Solomon takes readers into the trauma ward of one of Mumbai’s busiest public... read more about Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma »
After India achieved independence from the British in 1947, there remained five scattered... read more about Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India »
Funding Bodies is the first scholarly study of the National Endowment for the Arts to focus... read more about Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts »
Dante's Vita nuova has taken on a wide variety of different forms since its first publication in... read more about Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature »
