FROM THE DIRECTOR

* Click here to read a special message from Prof. Aravamudan on the passing of Dr. John Hope Franklin.

Welcome to the newly enhanced website of the Franklin Humanities Institute!

As you must be aware, the humanities study the range of activities and creativities that define, historicize, analyze, and prospect the future of the human. As one of Duke’s signature interdisciplinary institutes, we want to identify but also keep multiplying the various “ities” that make concrete the “human” via the evidence of the “humanities.”

I hope that looking through our publicity of various “ities”: upcoming events, past archives, and future funding opportunities will be an informative exercise. Make sure to check out our blog about topical events and issues in the humanities Also, do scroll through our calendar feeds with information on humanities-related programming at the FHI and at Duke. If, as Keats remarked, “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter,” do not forget to check out our archived programming, “ities” from past years that can keep converting unheard lectures into heard melodies via itunesU. Through this feature, we are proud to present a range of lectures and presentations that originally took place at the FHI.

Overall, I look forward to an amazing 2008-09 at the FHI. First of all, let me present our crown jewel, the upcoming Annual Seminar in what will be its tenth continuous year. In seeking to investigate Alternative Political Imaginaries, co-conveners Michael Hardt and Robyn Wiegman and their faculty group will be addressing some crucial structural conditions of the humanities today: why and how are the humanities politicized? When does the presence of politics in the humanities lead to cynicism and melancholy and when do alternative political imaginaries become consequential for the humanities?

This year we are extremely grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the rollout of two major new programs. Keeping in mind the legacy of John Hope Franklin, we are in the process of launching FHI residential fellowships for faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and we are delighted to be welcoming three HBCU Fellows to campus. In addition, we are commencing an innovative program for faculty book manuscript workshops for assistant and associate professors at Duke.

We are also very proud to announce a new affiliation with the Duke Human Rights Center (DHRC). Inaugural events featuring the FHI-DHRC partnership will include a lecture by Adam Hochschild and a discussion by Dr. John Hope Franklin with scholar Lea Wernick Fridman about the career of George Washington Williams.

Our Distinguished Scholars in Residence program will be an embarrassment of riches this year. We will welcome a performance studies scholar, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, political philosophers Etienne Balibar and Wendy Brown, and literary theorist Homi Bhabha as well as South African Contitutional Court Justice Yvonne Mokgoro.

We will sponsor a major conference in the Fall around comparative ancient and modern imperialisms entitled Empire Without End. In the Spring we will organize a symposium around sovereignty that will bring together members of the Faculty Seminar with the Distinguished Residents and the Mellon Annual Distinguished Lecturer . We will also cosponsor the major annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR).

Additionally, we are pleased to continue several of our major programs, including the Dissertation Working Groups and Wednesdays at the Center, plus a host of other individually programmed lectures and colloquia. Furthermore, as of last year, we are the home of the global Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, a role that allows us to take the pulse of interdisciplinary humanities scholarship and cross-institutional relationship-building across the world.

Indeed, a busy and eventful year is to follow, and I very much hope you will come back and visit us often during the year. As small drops make a mighty ocean, each of our “ities” this year keep radiating outward into that vast, complex and everchanging conversation around the human, fittingly called the humanities.

Yours sincerely,

Srinivas Aravamudan
Director, Franklin Humanities Institute and Professor of English
President, Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes