Franklin Humanities Institute
Mission
Founded in 1999, the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University is an interdisciplinary humanities center dedicated to supporting humanities, arts, and social science research and teaching at Duke. We seek to encourage serious humanistic inquiry throughout the entire University and to instill the general public with an awareness of the centrality of the humanities to the quality of human life and social interaction. We also promote scholarship that enhances social equity, especially research on race and ethnicity in their most profound historical and international dimensions. In this ambitious mission, we are inspired by our namesake, John Hope Franklin, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of History.
Located in the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute is built on a fundamentally collaborative model fitting Duke's emphasis on facilitating interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. Through an array of innovative programs, we seek to encourage the conversations, partnerships, and collaborations that are continually stimulating creative and fresh humanistic research, writing, and teaching at Duke.
Accomplishments
Our core program, the Franklin Seminars in the Humanities, is a humanities seminar built on a collaborative model of focused year-long inquiry around a broad unifying theme. The Seminar has since 1999 supported 87 research projects, including those by 49 faculty, 27 graduate students, 7 postdoctoral fellows, and 4 librarians. An additional 10 projects will be brought into the Seminar in 2005-06. To date, we have organized Seminars around two general areas: "race" (1999-2003) and "information" (2004-08). In 2006-07 our Franklin Seminar will overlap with a Mellon Sawyer Seminar that we will host that engages humanists in dialogue with the sciences and medicine.
We also sponsor numerous high-level, engaging, often collaboratively-sponsored public programs. These events include our popular lunchtime conversation series Wednesdays at The Center, co-organized with humanities departments and other Franklin Center consortium members. Since 2002, numerous Duke faculty members and other scholars, leaders, artists, and journalists have presented their work to interdisciplinary audiences through this series. Speakers have included Duke University Vice Provost for International Affairs Gilbert Merkx, Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Duke Violinist (and Ciompi Quartet member) Hsiao-mei Ku, Radio France Internationale Correspondent Dominique Roch, Duke Professor of Romance Studies Alice Kaplan, and Duke Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky.
In 2003, we experimented with using an annual theme to draw together and bring visibility to select interrelated humanities events around the Duke campus. The first Institute Theme, "Dissent: Past and Present,” was built around anniversary of the 1903 John Spencer Bassett affair in which Duke defended a professor's academic freedom. The "Dissent" series included twenty-three events in a variety of formats: lectures, performances, and films. It engaged members of twenty humanities departments, centers and programs at Duke. The 2004-05 theme, "Risky Knowledge," related to that year's Seminar focus on "Knowledge and Its Institutions." This series, comprised of more than thirty events, kicked off with a conference collaboratively sponsored with the Scholars at Risk Network, which Duke has since joined.
Each year we have also organized a visible public year-end symposium annually to build on our annual Seminar theme to address a large historical question in an interdisciplinary way for a public and scholarly audience. In 2003, our "Reparations in Perspective" panel, featuring John Hope Franklin and several other scholars, reached nearly 350 people in person and via webcast. In 2004, a panel discussion on the politics of archaeology featured eight Duke and UNC scholars in dialogue with historian Romila Thapar.
Thapar was visiting Duke as part of our Mellon Annual Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, started in 2003 with generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The Annual Lecture has to date featured literary scholar Emory Elliott, historian of India Romila Thapar, and literary theorist and filmmaker Mieke Bal.
Because we seek to enhance connections among those who produce scholarship and those who collect and disseminate it, we have developed several programs that bring Duke humanists together with colleagues in the libraries and in scholarly publishing. Through our Scholarly Publishing Events Series, planned in collaboration with Duke University Press on “The Role and Future of Scholarly Publishing in American Intellectual Life," we have held or planned nine events that highlight issues in scholarly publishing. In collaboration with the Library we have sponsored a workshop on “Careers in Research Libraries: Opportunities for Humanities Graduate Students and PhDs.” Additionally, through the support of the Mellon Foundation, we have sponsored year-long publishing internships at Duke University Press for several graduate and undergraduate students. Finally, we have provided crucial support for three library fellows in Franklin Seminar since 2002.
Again, thanks to support from the Mellon Foundation, we have offered support both to graduate and undergraduate students in the humanities. Our Graduate Careers workshop series and Mellon Dissertation Working Groups have underwritten graduate research and professional development. Our Interdisciplinary Teaching Workshop, held in 2004, encouraged participants to "teach outside the lines" by offering practical tips on such matters as team teaching and engaging the intellectual rationale for teaching that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
Finally, we have worked to build a meaningful and integrated humanities community at Duke. Through a number of communications mechanisms we have set up, the Institute has become a clearinghouse and publicizer of humanities happenings all across the campus. In 2005, we inaugurated the "FC-Humanities" announcement listserv and the regular "Humanities at Duke" events newsletter. To subscribe, please contact us.
