STAFF & AFFILIATED FACULTY

Srinivas Aravamudan
Director and Professor of English
President, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes
208 Franklin Center
919.668.0337
srinivas@duke.edu

Director Srinivas Aravamudan, Professor of English, gained his PhD at Cornell University and has taught at the University of Utah, and at the University of Washington. He joined the Duke English Department in the Fall of 2000. He specializes in eighteenth century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999, Duke University Press) won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (1999, Pickering and Chatto). His book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language was published by Princeton University Press in January 2006. He is working on two book-length studies, one on the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale, and the other on sovereignty and anachronism. His edition of William Earle’s antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press. Aravamudan was co-convener of the 2002-03 FHI Seminar, Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory. In addition to his roles as Director of the Franklin Humanities Insitute, he also serves as Professor of English at Duke, and as President of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes.

Grant Samuelsen
Associate Director
205 Franklin Center
919.684.6469
grant.samuelsen@duke.edu

Associate Director Grant Samuelsen joined the staff of the Institute in late 2005. In addition to serving as Associate Director of the FHI, he also serves as Program Manager for the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. Before coming to Duke, he served as Assistant Director at the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Grant has worked since 1992 in and around the development and management of programs in the visual and performing arts, humanities, and media, including positions as Director of Programs at Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), as a museum educator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and as Director of Foundation and Government Support for the Pittsburgh Symphony. He was Publisher of the Chicago-based visual arts magazine New Art Examiner and Executive Director of its parent organization, the Chicago New Art Association. As a curator at Washington Project for the Arts and in independent practice, he has organized over 20 exhibitions of contemporary art. He has also worked as an independent project development consultant, fundraising consultant, editor and writer for several commercial and nonprofit organizations and projects, including the Axial Pictures production of Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (A+E Television, 2002). He served as Assistant Editor of Money to Work II: Funding for Visual Artists, as editor of the NAAO Bulletin for the National Association of Artists’ Organizations, and he was the founding publisher and editor of Projector, a critical guide to culture in Chicago. He has published reviews and feature articles in New Art Examiner and other periodicals, and has written several exhibition catalogue essays. Grant holds a Masters in Public Management from the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also studied film at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Christina Chia
Assistant Director for Progams and Communications
204 Franklin Center
919.668.1902
christina.chia@duke.edu

Assistant Director for Programs and Communications Christina Chia joined the Franklin Humanities Institute staff in September 2006. Chris received her Ph.D. in English from Duke in 2004. Her dissertation traces the prehistory of the concept “people of color” in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States. Before coming to the FHI, Chris was Program Coordinator at the Duke Center for Multicultural Affairs. She has taught courses in Comparative Ethnic studies, Asian American Studies, and American Literature for the Center for Documentary Studies as well as the Department of English, where she currently holds an adjunct appointment. Intellectually, she’s a bit of a forager, with interests ranging critical race/ethnicity studies, animal studies, and, most recently, graphic novels and comics literature. She recently began a research project on animals, especially dogs, in the social world of the antebellum US plantation.

Mary Williams
Financial and Operations Manager
201 Franklin Center
919.668.1901
mhwillia@duke.edu

John Orluk
Program Coordinator
202 Franklin Center
919.668.2401
john.orluk@duke.edu

Before joining the Franklin Humanities Institute in 2008, Program Coordinator John Orluk spent four years as Concert Coordinator at Princeton University. There he provided logistical support for all aspects Princeton University Concerts, a professional chamber music series, as well as graduate and undergraduate level concerts, recitals, and workshops. John has studied music history at SUNY Buffalo, focusing on issues of authenticity in music. He also studied voice, performed with the opera workshop, and served as graduate assistant for opera workshop, choir, and chorus. John plays renaissance lute, is a member of the lute society of America, and enjoys performing on lute or as a singer whenever possible.

Affiliated Faculty

Cathy N. Davidson
John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and
Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English
Co-Founder, Franklin Humanities Institute
129 Franklin Center
919.668.1901
cathy.davidson@duke.edu

Cathy N. Davidson is the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English. From 1998 to 2006, she served as Duke University’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In this capacity, she had administrative responsibility for over sixty research programs that operate between and among Duke’s nine academic and professional schools. During that time, she and Dean Karla F. C. Holloway co-founded the Franklin Humanities Institute. She continues to lecture and consult widely on interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and innovative learning-applications of new technologies. She is past President of the American Studies Association and past editor of the journal American Literature. She is also a co-founder, with David Theo Goldberg, of HASTAC(pronounced “haystack,” an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). Davidson is the author or editor of eighteen books. Among the most recent is Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (a collaboration with documentary photographer Bill Bamberger), recipient of the Mayflower Cup Award for Non-Fiction. With Ada Norris, she edited American Indian Stories, Legends and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa, the first Penguin Classic devoted to a Native American author. Recently, she published an Expanded Edition of Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (originally published by Oxford University Press in 1986) and an updated edition of her classic work of travel writing, Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan. She is on the Board of Advisors for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s new initiative on Digital Media and Learning, and, along with Goldberg, is a recipient of MacArthur grants to write a monograph on “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” (forthcoming) and to run the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. She is presently working on two studies, a literary and historiographic analysis of Olaudah Equiano and another on cognition and learning