Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute announces the appointment of a new Faculty Director and the selection of participants for its fifth annual Seminar, to be held in the academic year 2003-04.

Srinivas Aravamudan, Associate Professor of English and co-convener of the 2002-03 Franklin Humanities Institute Seminar on “Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory,” has been named the Humanities Institute’s new Director. He will replace Cathy N. Davidson, one of the Humanities Institute’s founding directors, who will continue in her position as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke.

Aravamudan, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell and came to Duke in 2000, specializes in eighteenth century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999, Duke University Press) won the first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. A second book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in Cosmopolitan Contexts will be published by Princeton University Press in 2004.

“Srinivas did a brilliant job co-convening the faculty development Seminar hosted by the Franklin Humanities Institute,” noted outgoing Director Davidson. “I know he will bring the same vision to his directorship. I'm especially thrilled at his plans for events that have meaning to students, faculty, and the larger community.”

Observing that her year in the 2002-03 Seminar convened by Aravamudan and cultural anthropologist Charles Piot had been “the most intellectually and ethically energizing experience of my Duke career,” Duke historian Susan Thorne also hailed the appointment: “Srinivas's own ethical compass contributes mightily to his considerable gifts as a discussion leader and administrator. He wields his exacting standards with a gentle grace that draws people out; he's a great listener and a supportive colleague. His intellectual breadth is stunning as is his generosity.” The John Hope Franklin Center, she concluded, “is blessed in its leadership yet again.”

Aravamudan’s appointment coincides with the naming of a new group of Fellows for the 2003-04 Seminar on “Monument, Document: From Archive to Performance,” which will focus on questions of how human experience is preserved, remembered, recast, represented, and communicated.

Co-conveners for the new Seminar are Elizabeth Fenn, Assistant Professor of History, and Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History. From the Faculty in Arts and Sciences, the new Seminar Fellows will be Stanley Abe, Art and Art History, who will work on a survey of Chinese art; Valeria Finucci, Romance Studies, who will study women stage performers in early modern Italy; Richard Jaffe, Department of Religion, who will explore transformations in Japanese Buddhism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Anthony Kelly, Music Department, who will examine ways of capturing the “feel” of spontaneous forms of music through written notation; and Grant Parker, Department of Classical Studies, who will look at the use and reuse of Egyptian obelisks as they were moved about in the Roman world.

The Seminar also traditionally includes a Fellow from the Duke library system, and given the year’s focus on archives and documents, it is especially appropriate that Steven Hensen, Director of Planning and Project Development from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, will participate. Hensen will focus on broad questions of the politics of information, especially in the context of the widespread digitization of documents and the imposition of new rules of access to information in the age of counter-terrorism.

Two postdoctoral fellows will participate in the Seminar. From the University Writing Program comes Douglas Reichert Powell, a Mellon Lecturing Fellow with a Ph.D. in English who is working on a project on the re-emergence of Appalachia in literature and popular culture as a locus of national anxiety. Leigh Raiford, a Yale Ph.D. writing about photographic representation of African-American social movements, will also be a fellow, under sponsorship of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Finally, the Seminar will also include two Duke graduate students: Simon Hay, from the English Department, who is writing his dissertation on the use of the image of the ghost to explore temporal relationships in modernist literature; and Gonzalo Lamana, from Cultural Anthropology, whose dissertation focuses on the transition of Peru from center of the Inca empire to Spanish colony.

The Franklin Humanities Institute, founded in 1999 and located in the John Hope Franklin Center at 2204 Erwin Road in Durham, is dedicated to promoting humanistic inquiry throughout the university and beyond. Its work is supported collaboratively by the Provost’s Office, the College of Arts and Sciences at Duke, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Humanities Institute will sponsor public programming related to the Seminar theme throughout the 2003-04 school year. For information, contact the Institute at 668-1901 or visit our web site at http://www.duke.edu/web/institute.