The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute affirms the importance of scholarship that is both situated specifically, and that has a global reach. We attend to cultural paradoxes, elements of change and continuity, recognizing the significant, dynamic impact of cultural production on the development of political spaces and academic disciplines. These “cultural products” include, but are by no means confined to, the aesthetic objects that have traditionally been the objects of analysis in many humanities fields. We have embraced the study of interrelationships among a variety of productive new breakthroughs: in literary theory and cultural studies, in film, in social and historical analysis, in materialist subjectivity, in critical legal studies, critical race, class, and gender theory, affect theory and psychoanalysis, translation studies, in the politics of globalization, climate and health science, and the transformations wrought by new technologies. We encourage spirited scholarly writing, conventional or experimental, and other forms of scholarly production in all areas.

At the FHI we conduct our work through collective enterprises like Humanities Labs, speaker events, workshops and conferences, book manuscript workshops, working groups (led by faculty or graduate students), dissertation writing groups. We provide consultative support to faculty in areas of publishing, grant writing, and digital pedagogy. In addition to the Human Rights Undergraduate Certificate, administered by our affiliate the Duke Human Rights Center, and affiliated courses taught through the Humanities Labs, we offer co-curricular opportunities such as the PhD Lab and the summer program Story+ (the latter involving both undergraduates and graduate students). The FHI also generates a range of communications for campus and broader public audiences, from the web series Left of Black (which shifted productions to the FHI in 2019) to mini-documentaries, curated archives, and short publications.

Designated a “Signature Institute” in 2006, the FHI is today one of eleven University-wide Institutes, Initiatives, and Centers at Duke University. As such, the Institute is a key incubator of interdisciplinary, cross-school collaborations on racial justice, human rights, health, climate, datafication, and other “grand challenges” that, more than ever, require humanistic engagement at every level, from concept to method to content. Beyond Duke, the FHI is a founding partner, along with the University of Bologna and University of Virginia, of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory. As the former administrative base of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (2007-17), we remain an active participant in international conversations on the forms that humanities research, education, and advocacy might take in the present moment.

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 (most poignantly in an annual series named in his honor and a lab on the plantation, the arts, and the humanities named after his book From Slavery to Freedom). But it is also present as we seek to understand the way in which histories of slavery and colonialism have shaped 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.