Since 2015, the Franklin Humanities Institute has sponsored an event series in honor of our namesake, Dr. John Hope Franklin. We take seriously Dr. Franklin's demand to attend to both the untold stories and the familiar ones - “intellectualizing them,” as he put it - and to place those stories in the context of the world.
In Spring 2018, we launched a new annual lecture – the John Hope Franklin Lecture – as the signature event of the broader John Hope Franklin Legacies Series. Featuring prominent writers, thinkers, and artists with bodies of work that resonate within and beyond the university, the John Hope Franklin Lecture pays tribute to Dr. Franklin’s remarkable career as a scholar and in public service, as well as his wide-ranging influence in the study of history, law, African-American life and culture, and global intellectual exchange.
September 18 and 19, 2026 | Caribbean Poetics: Nature and the Visual Arts
A central feature of Caribbean poetics has been a pictorial mode of representing the natural landscape and the complex multicultural societies that have taken root in the archipelago. Verbal and visual arts converge in the creation of entangled ways of sensing and portraying the vulnerable yet resilient terrain of human interaction.
The Franklin Humanities Institute assembles an outstanding group of poets, artists, and scholars for a wide-ranging conversation about the interconnections between verbal depiction and visual aesthetics in the portrayal of the natural and socio-cultural worlds.
The Caribbean offers a particularly fecund eco-site from which to engage in such a conversation. Sea and land, plantation and garden, hurricane and drought, cultivation and extraction, human and more-than-human life have long shaped the region's social histories and imaginative practices. Several generations of leading Caribbean poets have continually re-imagined the terms through which landscape, ecology, embodiment, memory, violence, beauty, and survival can be perceived, represented and understood.
Across a day and a half of presentations and conversations, the symposium addresses the question of how poetry in concert with the visual arts might help us to view these relations from an entangled perspective. How do poetic and visual practices intersect to register the histories deeply layered in Caribbean landscapes and seascapes? What might Caribbean poetics contribute to our thinking about the planetary ecological crisis, racialized histories, and possibilities for living otherwise?
Speakers:
- Canisia Lubrin (University of Guelph)
- Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (Vassar College)
- Ishion Hutchinson (Cornell University)
- Maria Cristina Fumagalli (University of Essex)
- Mark McMorris (Georgetown University)
- Kei Miller (University of Miami)
- Manuel Arturo Abreu (Independent Researcher-Washington)
With video and other links where available
2023 | Tony Phillips, "John Hope Franklin: Hope at the BBC"; Conversation with Tony Phillips, Mark Anthony Neal, and John Gartrell
2022 | "Reconsidering 'The Historian in the World'" with Laurent Dubois, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Romila Thapar; event announcement with links to 2008 "The Historian in the World" video (iTunes) and edited transcript
2019 | Lecture by David Adjaye
2018 | Lecture/Reading by Natasha Tretheway (video excerpt)
2016 | "Reflections on Charleston" with Jennifer Pinckney, Rev. Kylon Middleton, and Rev. Chris Vaughn