John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute affirms the importance of scholarship that is both situated specifically (focused on specific historical, geographical, cultural contexts) and that has a global reach. Our work — which takes place through Humanities Labs, speaker series, workshops and conferences, book manuscript workshops, working groups, and other collective forms, and through affiliate programs such as the Duke Human Rights Center and the Forum for Scholars and Publics — attends to cultural paradoxes and elements of change and continuity, recognizing the significant, dynamic impact of cultural production on the development of political spaces and academic disciplines. As one of eleven University-wide Institutes, Initiatives, and Centers at Duke, the Institute is a key incubator of interdisciplinary, cross-school collaborations on racial justice, human rights, health, climate, new technologies, and other “grand challenges” that, now more than ever, require humanistic engagement at every level, from concept to method to content. In nearly all we do, we continue to be inspired by our namesake, John Hope Franklin. A pre-eminent historian of Black America, the US South, and the US and a life-long advocate of intellectual exchanges across national borders, Dr. Franklin urged attention to the immediate context and, at the same time, its relationship to the world more broadly. His influence is palpable in FHI work that explicitly centers on race. But it is also present as we seek to understand which histories of slavery and colonialism have shaped both the formation of the humanities disciplines and emerging interdisciplinary areas such as digital humanities, energy humanities, and health humanities. It is a fitting legacy for the task of a humanities institute in the 21st century.