The Franklin Humanities Institute was created in 1999 out of a basic respect for the work humanists do and the role humanists play within the academy and society. Originally proposed by Provost John Strohbehn in conjunction with Dean Bill Chafe, the concept of a humanities institute was fleshed out and supported by Bill Chafe and Provost Peter Lange, as a key component of the University’s strategic plan, Building on Excellence. In consultation with dozens of faculty and staff at Duke, Dean Karla Holloway and Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies Cathy Davidson coordinated the ensuing broad-based effort to create a humanities institute that would support the full range of humanities scholarship and find creative ways to translate that scholarship into the best undergraduate and graduate teaching. John Hope Franklin’s lifelong engagement with race and race relations and issues of social equity in the United States and globally lay the foundation for the work of the Humanities Institute both by providing a driving intellectual focus and by exhibiting a model for approaching other complex human concerns from interdisciplinary perspectives.

In 2000, Duke renovated an abandoned dormitory, known as the Hanes Annex, into the expansive, innovative John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies. The Franklin Center hosts offices for nineteen programs, fifteen courses a semester and well over a hundred events a year, most of them free and open to faculty, students, staff, and the wider community. It operates on a unique collaborative administrative and programmatic model, including shared state-of-the-art media and communications technology. By its mission and indenture, the Franklin Center is dedicated to the notion that scholarship should be shared.

In this bustling, experimental new complex, which opened in October of 2000 and was formally dedicated in honor of Franklin on February 9, 2001, one quiet wing was reserved for the Franklin Humanities Institute, a space dedicated to collaboration, community, and energetic promotion of the best and most creative work in the humanities, arts, and narrative and interpretive social sciences.