Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University

10/16/2026

Rachel Sandwell on "Women, Youth, and Anti-Colonial Struggle in South Africa's Exiled Liberation Movements,"

on Tuesday, October 20, at 12pm, at Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4, C105

Using the archives of the African National Congress of South Africa & the letters and memoirs of past activists, this talk will examine how women shaped the exiled struggle against apartheid in South Africa. From the 1960s through the 1980s, South African women pushed the mainstream of the anti-apartheid movement to consider women's particular suffering under apartheid, and to fight for broad social transformation as part of overthrowing apartheid. At the same time, within the movement, generational tensions also sparked conversation and at times heated disagreement over topics like s*x education, access to birth control, and the right to family life within a militarized revolutionary movement. These challenging conversations reveal that younger generations of exiles brought new political ideas into the movement from the mid-1970s onwards, transforming an aging political organization into a more militant formation.

Rachel Sandwell (Cornell University) is author of National Liberation and the Political Life of Exile: S*x, Gender, and Nation in the Struggle Against Apartheid .

Free lunch! - RSVP here: https://du.ke/sandwell

Event Sponsored by:
Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI), Concilium on Southern Africa, Gender, S*xuality, and Feminist Studies, History, International Comparative Studies (ICS)

10/16/2026

Tift Merritt, Grammy-nominated musician and practitioner-in-residence at Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute, and Margaret Louise Brown, senior research scholar at the Duke Forum for Scholars and Publics, are leading a project team that is connecting archival research to the arts.

The project is inspired by the work of pioneering feminist jazz historian and entrepreneur Rosetta Reitz and grew out of a moment of discovery. In 2020, while preparing for a virtual conference, Merritt encountered the album "Sweet Petunias," a vinyl compilation of independent women’s blues music produced by Reitz in the mid-1980s. That listening experience led her to Rosetta Records, then to a tribute site for Rosetta Reitz, and finally to the realization that Reitz’s archive was housed at Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Merritt and Brown share thoughts about how their team approaches exploring the Reitz archive, why interdisciplinary collaboration is central to the process, and why creativity is important in research.

Read more about their impact here:

"Storytelling can be an act of care: it’s a way of making change and putting something meaningful into the world. We think a lot about how Rosetta interrupted harmful pat

10/16/2026

Like many in the Duke community and beyond, we are mourning the loss of Prof. Ara Wilson, capacious thinker and scholar, much-cherished teacher, mentor, and colleague. Ara was a wonderful friend of the FHI, organizing and participating in many of our events over the years, always bringing her keen mind and good humor. Most memorably, she co-organized a year-long series on Transgender Studies and the Humanities. One of the highlights of the FHI’s Humanities Futures initiative, this series centered pedagogy in its vision of gender and s*xuality studies. It created invaluable opportunities for graduate students to build new intellectual networks and help shape the project. We will miss Ara’s energy and genuine care for others. RIP.

Ara Wilson, associate professor of Gender, S*xuality & Feminist Studies, died on

10/16/2026

FHI is excited to invite you to an event with Mongane Wally Serote, Poet Laureate of South Africa, on Thursday, 10/22, in the Nelson Music Room (East Duke Building 201). Please share this invitation widely. More info below...

Mongane Wally Serote, the Poet Laureate of South Africa will present an evening of poetry and reflections on the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, when students bravely fought back against apartheid education policies, and were met with shocking police violence. Serote is the author of numerous collections of poetry as well as 5 novels. Like the U.S. Black Arts Movement writers he befriended during years in exile, his work has taken inspiration from jazz, coming of age stories, and liberation traditions. He was a long-time anti-apartheid activist, and continues to advocate for a more just society through his literary and public activities. Duke is proud to welcome him for this presentation, which will be followed by conversation with the audience facilitated by Professor Tsitsi Jaji.

Sponsor(s): Concilium on Southern Africa, African and African American Studies (AAAS), English, and Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI)

10/05/2026

Raised by a working class, functionally illiterate Black father in the Bronx, author Mark Anthony Neal struggled to square his own upbringing with how he chose to parent when he became a dad of two girls. Our Forum @ FHI hosted an enlightened conversation between Mark Anthony Neal and karla francesca on Dr. Neal’s new book, “Save A Seat For Me: Notes on American Fatherhood,” from Simon & Schuster. The Durham County Library made for a wonderful venue with an eager audience ready to get their signed copy. Stay tuned for the upcoming event video!

09/15/2026

"How a 'Civil Rights' Organization Turns Against Social Justice Movements: The ADL in Context"

-> Book talks with Emmaia Gelman, author of _The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State_ (UC Press)

Two events:
1) At UNC-Chapel Hill

Wed. 9/23 5:30-7:00 pm

FedEx Global Education Center, room 1005
301 Pittsboro St
Chapel Hill, NC 27516
Free parking after 5 pm

2) At Duke

Th. 9/24 5:00-6:30 pm

Smith Warehouse, Bay 4
Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall
114 S. Buchanan Blvd., Durham, NC 27701
Parking info: fhi.duke.edu/about/find-us/

About the book:
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a major US political organization, yet its politics have gone largely unexamined. While the ADL is often portrayed as a defender against antisemitism and racism, its history shows that it is better understood as a proponent of the racial state and US empire. From "correcting" the embarrassing racial difference of immigrant Jews to policing the leftist politics of Black, Arab, and Jewish groups, the ADL pursued a conservative version of civil rights paired with aggressive anti-communism. Even as it became an authority on white nationalism in the 1970s, the ADL joined with the emerging anti-left, anti-Arab, and pro-Western neoconservative movement.

This history presaged the ADL's work, from the 1980s to the present, in developing the hate crimes framework as a pro-state policing project, which soon merged with the "War on Terror," the "antisemitism scare," and anti-Palestinian racism. The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State presents the ADL's history through its conflicts with social justice movements, illuminating the ADL's outsize role in shaping the ideas about race and rights that have underwritten US empire.

Read more about the book here: https://emmaiagelman.com/books/

Co-sponsored at Duke by John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Department of Gender, S*xuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke Universityr, and Program in International Comparative Studies at Duke University

09/15/2026

Our programming around the Declaration of Independence at Durham County Main Library continues on Tuesday (Sept. 15) with "The American Revolution at 250: Historians Discuss the Many Worlds of 1776" at 6 p.m.

Famously, in December 1773, over a hundred colonists snuck onto ships in Boston Harbor after nightfall, destroying chests of tea worth nearly $2 million today. Often portrayed as a local tax protest that helped spark a Revolution, this event raises all kinds of questions: How did others elsewhere in America and across the world see such an affair? Why were the protesters dressed as Native Americans? Where did all that tea come from in the first place?

The “Boston Tea Party” was just one example of the many ways in which the American Revolution was a global phenomenon, whose causes and consequences reached from India and China to Indigenous nations across the North American continent.

Join us as Duke historians Adriane Lentz-Smith and Philip Stern launch a year of discussions on these many different “Worlds of 1776,” in conversation with UNC historian Kathleen DuVal, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Native Nations: A Millennium in North America.

Brought to you by Duke We the People: A Duke & Durham Initiative; the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute; and the Duke University Department of History’s 2026-2027 program on the “Worlds of 1776.”

Sponsored by the Triangle Early American History Seminar.

09/15/2026

09/10/2026

You are invited to a film screening and discussion with Tara Moore, the director of the 2025 Oscar® Long-Listed documentary "Legacy: Apartheid's Shadow." The film offers a history of apartheid and of the anti-apartheid movement, but also brings the conversation into the contemporary divisions that persist in South Africa, as well as what it means to be white and privileged in South Africa.

Tuesday, Sept. 22, 5:00-7:00pm
Location: Smith Warehouse, Bay 5, Room B189
Free and open to the public

09/09/2026

What can visual culture reveal about the making of a nation and an empire?

Join the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Duke University Libraries for our next Faculty Bookwatch, celebrating Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History Gennifer Weisenfeld’s remarkable body of scholarship on modern Japan.

🗓️ When: Thursday, September 17, 2026 5PM
🌐 Where: Rubenstein Library 153
🖋️ RSVP: https://duke.is/BookwatchFall2026

The conversation will highlight her newest book, The Fine Art of Persuasion, alongside The Complete Commercial Artist and Gas Mask Nation. Each work explores the powerful connections between visual culture, identity, politics, nation-building, and empire.

Weisenfeld will be joined by distinguished scholars Leo Ching, Christine M. E. Guth, Simon Partner, and Benjamin Uchiyama, with Ranji Khanna moderating.