Erica Lorraine Williams, former FHI Mellon HBCU Fellow, on her new book, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements. When Brazil's tourism department uses Black sexuality to promotes their nation as a paradise of escape, how are Afro-Brazilian women viewed and treated in light of this marketing? Fantastic talk from Prof. Williams. Erica Lorraine Williams is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. Professor Williams won the National Women's Studies Association/University of...

Ato Quayson delivers a public lecture as part of his short-term residency at the FHI, dealing with diasporic literature in greater context of post-colonialism. Ato Quayson is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning...

This talk investigates the use of fast fashion -- cheap chic pedaled by behemoths such as Zara and H&M -- by a group of undocumented immigrant women who wear the clothes to labor in New York City's nail salons. In the wake of Rana Plaza, how can we move forward with a critique of fast fashion that accounts for the diversity of users and uses? Jessamyn Hatcher teaches fashion studies and the humanities in the Global Liberal Studies program at New York University. She is working on a book...

Launched in 2012, Public Books is an online monthly review magazine devoted to spirited debate about books and the arts and was recently named a "Best Site" by the Daily Beast. Publishing timely, provocative essays that bring academic ideas to bear on recently published works of fiction, non-fiction, and media culture, Public Books establishes a forum where scholars can write in a publicly appealing voice, develop strong arguments, and bring their deep knowledge of their subjects to bear on...

BorderWork(s) Lab (http://sites.fhi.duke.edu/borderworks/) students Elizabeth Blackwood, Mary Kate Cash, Katie Contess, Rachel Fleder, Lauren Jackson, Jordan Noyes, and Jeremy Tripp led a gallery tour of Defining Lines: Cartography in the Age of Empire (http://sites.fhi.duke.edu/defininglines/). Defining Lines is on view at Duke's Nasher Museum from September 9 - December 15, 2013. This student-curated installation draws exclusively from the holdings of Duke University's David M. Rubenstein...

Trading Races is an elaborate paper-based role-playing game set at the University of Michigan in April 2003. Players take on the roles of real historical characters and multi-ethnic and multi-national members of an imaginary Student Assembly as they tackle the Supreme Court affirmative action cases brought against the university. Adeline Koh is Director of DH@Stockton and and assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College in NJ. She came to Duke on a fellowship.

Writing is Thinking II: Taking It to the Next Level, a writing event and workshop sponsored by the Center for Philosophy, Arts and Literature (PAL), The Thompson Writing Program, and the Graduate School, built on the concepts introduced in the original workshop held on Friday, January 28, 2011, titled “Writing as Thinking: Writing as a Way of Life in the Academy.” Here, the next step was taken by posing key questions necessary to the graduate student writer. How do we figure out what to...

Chimamanda Adichie, author of the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and the short story collection That Thing Around Your Neck (2009), discusses her work with the Africa Initiative, a co-sponsored event with the Center for African and Africa American Research . Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2008)....

The Graduate Students of the Duke University Department of History were pleased to invite Dr. Thomas Laqueur, professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Laqueur was the keynote speaker for Navigating Place and Power, an annual one-day conference at Duke University, which took place on Friday, February 15, 2013. This interdisciplinary conference sought to promote dialogue between scholars of various disciplines in order to explore how individuals and groups negotiate...

The 2013 FHI Annual Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Rob Nixon, Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prof. Nixon's visit will be jointly sponsored by the FHI and the Nicholas School of the Environment. Rob Nixon is currently the Rachel Carson Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Nixon received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is the author of London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford...

Panelists include François Noudelmann, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and the European Graduate School, journalist at France Culture, and author of the essay The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche and Barthes at the Piano; Professor Jacqueline Waeber, a specialist of Rousseau from the Duke Department of Music; Olivier Dejours, composer, conductor, and former member of Les Percussions de Strasbourg.

Panelists include François Noudelmann, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and the European Graduate School, journalist at France Culture, and author of the essay The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche and Barthes at the Piano; Professor Jacqueline Waeber, a specialist of Rousseau from the Duke Department of Music; Olivier Dejours, composer, conductor, and former member of Les Percussions de Strasbourg.

Panelists include François Noudelmann, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII and the European Graduate School, journalist at France Culture, and author of the essay The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche and Barthes at the Piano; Professor Jacqueline Waeber, a specialist of Rousseau from the Duke Department of Music; Olivier Dejours, composer, conductor, and former member of Les Percussions de Strasbourg.

Join us for a lecture vie teleconference with Jean-Luc Nancy, the seminal French philosopher in the tradition of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida. Please note that the lecture will be in French, with simultaneous translation. An English translation of the conference paper will be circulated before the lecture. His work questions politics, ontology, and aesthetics and has shown a particular interest in music. He recently collaborated with composer Sergio Perezzani on "Au bord du sens” for...

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is currently a member at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is also a founding member of Hagar school for Jewish Arab education for equality. Professor Gordon’s most recent book is Israel's Occupation (University of California, 2008) -- acclaimed by critics as one of the most important works on the military occupation to date. He has written numerous scholarly articles primarily on issues relating to human...

Erving Goffman used the language of theater, and a close analysis of what happens on stage, to generate a theory of social experience. This paper adopts Goffman’s approach, based on elementary “strips” of interaction, and repurposes it for the quantitative study of plays as micro-encounters that build into macro-structures. The encounter provides a computational signal and an interpretive concept in the “window,” an arbitrarily cut strip of a given number of speeches in a play. As the window...

Harnessing the “data deluge” is promoting new conversations between disciplines. Prof. Marciano and his collaborators have been pursuing research in a number of areas including: big cultural data, access to big heterogeneous data, records in the cloud, federated grid/cloud storage, visual interfaces to large collections, policy-based frameworks to automate content management, and distributed cyberinfrastructure to enable data sharing. But more importantly, innovative technical approaches...

Jennifer Doyle is Associate Professor of English at UC Riverside. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minnesota 2006) and the forthcoming Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke). Her blog, From A Left Wing, is a leading site for the discussion of women's soccer and gender and of sport more broadly. She will be speaking about her perspective on the 2011 Women's World Cup, which she spent in France and Germany, and about the past...

Poet Nikky Finney, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry, reads from her latest book, "Head Off & Split". Following the reading, Finney has a conversation with Thavolia Glymph, Duke Professor of African and African American Studies and History and Michael Taussig, Columbia University Professor of Anthropology.

Kathryn Sikkink, recipient of the 2011 Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)-Duke University Human Rights Book Award, reads from and discusses her award-winning book, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. Sikkink is a Regents Professor and the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

It is a truism that light creates space; however, both the absence and the presence of light can create provocative visual effects. With her installation, UltraSuper, Stacy Lynn Waddell employs the power of hyperbole to highlight the connections between blinding light and seemingly absent forms of blackness. As such, she questions and responds to Andy Warhol’s outré productions made in his glittering, 1960s proto-glam loft, the Silver Factory. Characterized by overabundant blasts of light...

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center

John Hope Franklin Center