Franklin Humanities Institute
Encyclopedia
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
dedicated to supporting humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
, arts, and social science research and teaching. The institute's mission is to encourage humanistic inquiry throughout Duke campus and to raise public awareness of the humanities. Named after the prominent African American historian and civil rights activist John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin was a United States historian and past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and...
, who retired from Duke in 1985 as the James B. Duke professor of History, the institute has also made a commitment to promote scholarship that enhances social equity, especially through research on race and ethnicity.
The Franklin Humanities Institute is part of a consortium of interdisciplinary research centers and institutes located at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke.
History
The Franklin Humanities Institute was founded in 1999 by Cathy DavidsonCathy Davidson
Cathy N. Davidson is an American scholar and university professor. She has served as the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English at Duke University since 1996 and has held a second distinguished chair as the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies since 2006...
, then Vice Provost for interdisciplinary Studies, and Karla FC Holloway, former Dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2002, the Institute received a three-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York City and Princeton, New Jersey in the United States, is a private foundation with five core areas of interest, endowed with wealth accumulated by the late Andrew W. Mellon of the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is the product of the 1969...
for a project entitled “Making the Humanities Central.” The grant was renewed for a second three-year cycle in 2005.
In Spring 2007, the FHI became the new administrative headquarters of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)
Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)
Established in 1988, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes serves as a site for the discussion of issues germane to the fostering of crossdisciplinary activity and as a network for the circulation of information and the sharing of resources within the humanities and interpretive...
, an international organization that supports interdisciplinary humanities scholarship and institution-building. Prior to moving to Duke, the CHCI was based at Harvard University.
The current Director of the FHI is Srinivas Aravamudan.
Programs
The Franklin Humanities Institute sponsors an annual residential seminar consisting of Duke faculty, graduate research fellows, a post-doctoral fellow, and professional staff at the university (e.g. librarians, IT specialist). Conceived as a “laboratory” for humanists from diverse disciplines, each annual seminar focuses on a theme or problem with broad historical, philosophical, or geographical scope. To date, there have been seminars organized around two general areas: “Race” (1999–2003) and “Art, Ideas, and Information” (2004–08). The 2007-08 seminar, Recycle, will explore the appropriation of cultural products in different contexts. The seminar will be co-convened by Neil De MarchiNeil De Marchi
Neil De Marchi is an Australian economist and historian of economic thought.During the 2007-08 academic year, Neil De Marchi has convened the Recycle Seminar at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute with Mark Anthony Neal and Annabel J...
(Professor of Economics), Mark Anthony Neal
Mark Anthony Neal
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching...
(Associate Professor or African and African American Studies), and Annabel J. Wharton (William B. Hamilton Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies).
In addition to the Annual Seminar, the Franklin Humanities Institute also runs a dissertation working group for graduate students.
The FHI’s public programs include Wednesdays at the Center, a popular lunchtime conversation series open to the general public. Since 2002, series speakers have included the Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, the Ciompi Quartet
Ciompi Quartet
The Ciompi Quartet is a string quartet at Duke University where they were founded in 1965 by Giorgio Ciompi. They have produced twelve recordings since 1991....
violinist Hsiao-mei Ku, Radio France
Radio France
Radio France is a French public service radio broadcaster.-Mission:Radio France's two principal missions are:* To create and expand the programming on all of their stations; and...
Internationale Correspondent Dominique Roch, the writer and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman
Ariel Dorfman
Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.-Personal...
, as well as John Hope Franklin himself.
The Mellon Annual Distinguished Lecture in Humanities has featured well-known scholars from many fields and from across the globe, including the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a Ghanaian-British-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up in Ghana and earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge...
(2007), the British filmmaker Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien is an installation artist and filmmaker.-Biography:Julien graduated from St Martin's School of Art in 1985, where he studied painting and fine art film...
(2006), the Dutch cultural theorist and video artist Mieke Bal (2005), the Indian historian Romila Thapar
Romila Thapar
Romila Thapar is an Indian historian whose principal area of study is ancient India.-Work:After graduating from Panjab University, Thapar earned her doctorate under A. L. Basham at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London in 1958...
(2004), and the US literary critic Emory Elliott
Emory Elliott
Emory Elliott was a professor of American literature at UC Riverside.An authority on many topics in literature, Elliott was known in particular for advocating the expansion of the literary canon to include a more diverse range of voices.-Childhood and education:Elliott came from a working-class...
(2003).
Technology Initiatives
In 2006, Duke joined five other American universities - Brown, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the Missouri School of Journalism, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison - in a venture with Apple Computer to test iTunes U, a web-based tool designed for faculty and students to share digital content, such as audio, video and images. As one of the participants on the Duke iTunes U project, the Franklin Humanities Institute has made a number of its public events available for download as video and audio podcasts.External links
- Franklin Humanities Institute Podcasts at Duke iTunes U (iTunes required)
- Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes
- Duke University