John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Executive Summary
Based on input from faculty and department chairs, our advisory board, and our own observations and conclusions, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute has identified six strategic goals that will guide our development. These strategic goals are as follows:
- Contribute to a productive balance between interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity.
- Enhance FHI involvement in curriculum development and teaching innovation.
- Continue to facilitate arts/humanities connections.
- Support collaboration and community in the humanities through information exchange.
- Develop engaged and visible community engagement initiatives.
- Enhance the FHI's role as a leading organization in its field.
To build tangibly on these themes, our plan offers a series of proposed new initiatives and programs, including: the development of postdoctoral teaching fellowships in exchange for the loss of faculty members to the FHI seminar; interdisciplinary faculty positions; additional external fellowships; programs designed to contribute to arts/humanities linkages at Duke; the development of community engagement programs keyed to successful existing program frameworks; the creation of new communications and community building mechanisms for the humanities at Duke; and the development of a national leadership role in the humanitiesthrough greater involvement in organizations such as the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).
Our approach to the challenges posed in our planning mandate assumes that we will maintain a baseline set of programs such as our major lectures, Franklin Seminar, dissertation working groups, Duke Press partnership, and serial programs such as the highly successful Wednesdays at the Center. In keeping with our founding principles and mission, we will continue to pursue programs that highlight the study of race and inequity in historical and global perspectives.
Indications of the FHI's uniqueness on the Duke campus are pervasive in our plan: the FHI's function is a crosscutting one, and our operative metaphor is that of a research laboratory for the humanities, whose resources and programs are intended to benefit the largest possible range of constituencies. As such, our planning has focused on the creation of robust programmatic structures designed to support, but be somewhat independent of, specific intellectual themes.
To reflect the cross-cutting, interdisciplinary nature of the FHI's mission, the content of this plan was developed with extensive input from the FHI's Advisory Board and humanities department chairs, to whom we owe a great deal of gratitude for their time, energy, and collaborative spirit.