John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

The Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) is an interdisciplinary humanities center at Duke University dedicated to supporting humanities, 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, 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 at Duke University. It was formerly located at the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke, and is now located in the historic Smith Warehouse on Duke's East Campus.

The Franklin Humanities Institute was founded in 1999 by Cathy Davidson, 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 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), an international organization that supports interdisciplinary humanities scholarship and institution-building. Prior to moving to Duke, the CHCI was based at Harvard University.

Srinivas Aravamudan was the Director of the FHI before he took the position as Dean of Humanities at Duke University in 2009. Ian Baucom was the Director of the FHI before he took the position of Buckner W. Clay Dean of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia in 2014. David Bell is serving as Interim Director of the FHI in 2014-15.

In Fall 2010 the FHI moved to the renovated Smith Warehouse on Duke's East Campus, near the heart of Durham's historic Downtown district. The Warehouse is home to the Humanities Laboratories initiative, which aims to contribute to Duke's research and pedagogical missions by convening groups of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates around discipline-crossing projects, in spaces designed specifically to facilitate collaborative work. Complementing historic strengths in supporting faculty and graduate scholarship (notably through the twelve Annual Seminars they hosted between 1999 and 2011), the Labs invite undergraduates to participate as researchers themselves, helping to define emerging and future areas of humanistic inquiry. Since 2011-12, the Lab initiative became a key element of Humanities Writ Large, a major university-wide Mellon Foundation grant. In 2012-13 the undergraduate-focused Labs were joined by the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge.

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