August 2009: Nicholas Institute Winter Forum "Making the Green Economy Work"
November 2008: Project Change with the Kenan Institute for Ethics
September 2008: FHI 2008-09 HBCU Faculty Fellows
July 2008: Duke Center for Science Education
April 2008: Provost's Common Fund, Vision and Design: a Year of Bloomsbury
Nicholas Institute Taking the Lead in "Making the Green Economy Work"
First Annual Winter Forum Set for January 11-12, 2010
There will be a new way this year to get a jump-start on the spring semester—by attending the first annual Winter Forum. The two-day conference for undergraduates will be held on Monday and Tuesday, January 11 and 12, at the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, just before classes begin on January 13. The topic for this year’s first forum, “Making the Green Economy Work,” will feature the perspectives of Duke faculty and invited guest speakers from fields as diverse as engineering, economics, law, business, environment, and sociology, among others.
The annual forum will evaluate a global issue from the perspectives of multiple disciplines and cultures, and engage faculty and students in collaborative work. This year’s forum is being led by the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Education.
“We’re excited to be organizing this first Winter Forum,” remarked Tim Profeta, director of the Nicholas Institute. “We’ve invited top-notch speakers, including Chad Holliday, Chairman of DuPont, and some of the best faculty at Duke, to make this a thought-provoking—and solutions-provoking—couple of days. The green economy—what exactly it is, what the potential for it is, and how it works—is on a lot of minds right now, and the Winter Forum will engage everyone in thinking and working through these and other important questions.”
More information about the Winter Forum, including application materials, will be posted throughout the fall semester at: http://undergraduatedean.duke.edu/winterforum/.
November 2008
New Kenan Institute for Ethics program challenges students’ ethical leadership—even before the first day on campus.
No laptops, no cell phones—sometimes not even a bed! What a way to begin college! But that’s exactly what twenty-one incoming students experienced for eight days in August, during Project Change, the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ new pre-orientation program.
The innovative program, carried out in partnership with the Duke Women’s Center, consisted of two parts—an exploration of Durham, to help students become acquainted with their new home for the next four years, and a “service challenge,” to cultivate students’ organizational and community leadership through an applied problem-solving experience. The twenty-one students were chosen over the summer through a competitive application process which yielded over 300 applications.
In the exploration of Durham, the students competed in team-building activities throughout the city, took a Civil Rights walking tour, held a movie night, a book discussion, and even a camping adventure. 
“The students developed an intense bond over the eight days,” remarked Suzanne Shanahan, Associate Director of the Kenan Institute and Assistant Professor of Sociology. “And it didn’t end with the beginning of classes. The students continue to follow up with each other, and several are engaged with us at the Institute, to extend the experience.”
In the “service challenge,” three teams of seven students worked in collaboration with a local non-profit organization to determine a core need of the served population. The students then designed and piloted a program or project to meet that need.
“We always talk about the Kenan Institute as a ‘think and do’ tank,” commented Noah Pickus, Director of the Institute and Associate Research Professor of Public Policy Studies. “And that’s exactly what these students did. They approached community issues with intellectual reflection on ethical leadership and change, but with a practical drive to make real changes.”
The three community service organizations that partnered in Project Change were: Genesis Home, which provides housing and services in an effort to end family homelessness; TROSA, a long-term, residential substance abuse recovery program; and El Centro Hispano, a community-based organization focused on improving community and quality of life for Durham-area Latino residents. The project evaluated at the end of the week to have had the greatest impact was the group that partnered with Genesis Home. The grand prize for the students was an evening of dinner and a Durham Bulls baseball game, and a donation to the organization.
“Project Change was very successful in this, its first year,” added Shanahan. “I know it was a demanding as well as stimulating experience, one that tested the students, their families, faculty, community leaders and local residents alike. But it was undoubtedly an invaluable and unique experience that will have a lasting impact on the students’ lives.”
Project Change is one of four pre-orientation programs offered to incoming students each year. For more information on pre-orientation programs, please visit the Division of Student Affairs’ New Student and Family Programs website here.
September 2008
Franklin Humanities Institute Announces New Fellowship Program for Faculty at Historically Black Colleges & Universities
Faculty Fellows Will Contribute to the FHI’s Mission of Interdisciplinary Research and Scholarship
With major support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) recently awarded three faculty fellowships in a new program aimed at faculty members in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The first group of FHI HBCU Fellows includes two humanities scholars and a visual artist whose work responds to issues – the media, race, globalism – of critical import to humanists.
HBCU Faculty Fellows will be on campus throughout the 2008-2009 academic year, and will focus primarily on conducting research. In an effort to enrich the intellectual ties between Duke and HBCUs, the Fellows will also lead talks, participate in seminars, and engage in other, social opportunities.
“This program enables us to provide annual faculty fellowships to a group of colleagues in HBCUs that have a great need for unencumbered research time and whose research will intersect in myriad ways with colleagues in the humanities and social sciences at Duke,” commented FHI Director Srinivas Aravamudan. “Furthermore, the program creates opportunities to work with a cohort of universities that are ideal partners for the FHI's core mission involving the legacy of Dr. Franklin, who endeavored to advance scholarship on social inequity in a broad historical and international frame. We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their visionary leadership in helping fund this program.”
Following a national call for proposals in early 2008, the distinguished faculty committee, which included Tina Campt (Women’s Studies), Anthony Kelly (Music), Wahneema Lubiano (African and African American Studies), Richard Powell (Art, Art History and visual Studies), and FHI Director Srinivas Aravamudan, selected from over 30 high-quality proposals. In addition to the two planned awards, the review committee decided to award a third fellowship in the first year of the program, with generous contributions from Art, Art History and Visual Studies, the Visual Studies Initiative, and the department of African and African American Studies.
The 2008-2009 fellowships were awarded to:
• Dana Adrian Williams, Associate Professor of English at Howard University, who specializes in contemporary African American Literature;
• Fatimah Tuggar, Assistant Professor of Art at Winston-Salem State University, who specializes in digital photomontages of African and American daily life; and
• Jelani M. Favors, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, who is researching the role that HBCUs played in the African American Freedom Struggle as well as the larger Civil Rights struggle.
"The fellows who will be joining us next year each bring something different and valuable to the FHI,” remarked Aravamudan. “Dr. Williams' research on Toni Morrison's career as an editor at Random House looks at this much-studied figure as an institution-builder rather than the more typical lens of being a world-renowned novelist. Dr. Favors' work on the history of political activism within HBCUs raises superb questions about the extent, scope and political meaning of the civil rights movement across institutions of higher education. And Professor Tuggar's provocative and internationally known new media works and installations will diversify the spectrum of the FHI's programming and add to the cultural mix of the Franklin Center [for Interdisciplinary and International Studies]."
The funding from the Mellon Foundation is the third consecutive multi-year grant from the Foundation that the FHI has received. The 2008-2009 academic year is the first of three years of funding for the HBCU fellowship program. Further information on each of the Faculty Fellows appears below.
2008-2009 FHI HBCU Faculty Fellows
Jelani M. Favors earned his Ph.D. in history from The Ohio State University in 2006, where his research interests included the Civil Rights Movement, slavery and the Nadir. He received his B.A. in History from North Carolina A&T State University. Favors comes to the Franklin Humanities Institute from the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, where he is Assistant Professor of History. He is in the initial stages of preparing his first manuscript, Shelter in a Time of Storm: Black Colleges and the Rise of Student Activism. This ongoing project focuses on the role historically Black colleges and universities played in the African American Freedom Struggle as well as the larger Civil Rights struggle, a topic which previous historical scholarship and research has consistently overlooked. Uniquely, Favors’ current research concentrates on the activist energies and practices of local African American students rather than those affiliated with national institutions or coalitions. His work will greatly contribute to increasing our historical knowledge regarding black student activism, and the role of HBCUs in shaping national politics.
Fatimah Tuggar, Assistant Professor of Art at Winston-Salem State University, is a Nigerian-born artist who creates alluring digital photomontages that juxtapose scenes from African and American daily life. Her works comment on themes such as ethnicity, technology and post-colonial culture that extend beyond simple cross-cultural comparisons. Her aim is to technically and conceptually elucidate critical cultural issues that emerge from the various ways in which new media technologies temper social relationships and shape existing mediatic power structures. Her web-based interactive pieces which oftentimes incorporate animated elements, construct non-linear narratives that top explore the way media, as a specific type of cultural commodity, impacts our reality. The pieces can best be described as digital collages that explore cross-cultural issues through visual means.
Tuggar completed her MFA at Yale University in 1992. Since then she has exhibited internationally at venues such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2003), Centre Georges Pompidou (2005), Paris and the Bamako Biennalle, Mali (2003), to name a few. She has received numerous grants from distinguished institutions such as The Rema Mann Hort Foundation, New York, the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, and the The Wheeler Foundation, Brooklyn. She has lectured and presented her work at several institutions including Claremont Graduate University and California State University, Wellesley College, and the New School. Tuggar continues to draw on popular advertisements, entertainment and folklore to explore the broader implications of technology in our lives.
Dana Adrian Williams, Associate Professor of English at Howard University, specializes in contemporary African American Literature. She earned her B.A. in English from Grambling State University in Grambling, LA in 1993, her M.A. in 1995 from Howard University, and her Ph.D. in African American Literature from Howard University in 1998. A recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar award in 1999, she was a visiting research fellow at Northwestern University, where she completed extensive research on her dissertation author Leon Forrest. Recently she completed the first book-length study on Leon Forrest, In the Light of Likeness—Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest (Ohio State UP 2005). Before returning to Howard University as a faculty member in 2003, Dr. Williams taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge for four years.
Dana Williams’ other major publications include, Contemporary African American Female Playwrights: An Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood 1999), which she completed as her Master’s thesis at Howard University, and August Wilson and Black Aesthetics (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2004) which she co-edited with Sandra G. Shannon.
In addition to her book projects, Dr. Williams has published articles in CLA Journal, African American Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, Emmanuel Nelson’s African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, John Lowe’s Approaches to Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the Cambridge Companion to African American Women Writers (forthcoming).
July 2008
Duke Center for Science Education interweaves faculty research, student education, and community outreach.
This summer, while many in the education field are enjoying a vacation, students at the Duke Center for Science Education are hard at work perfecting a 3D animated interactive model of alcohol metabolism in the body. The model is a continuation of the year-long course Research Independent Study in Science Education, led by Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom, Director of the Center and Professor of Pharmacology.
In the first year of the innovative independent study course, undergraduate students majoring in biology, chemistry, engineering, computer science, and visual arts teamed up to develop the instructive model. When completed, it will be available online, as well as in the DiVE (Duke Immersive Virtual Environment). The work this summer is aided with additional input from high school students in two Duke summer programs: the Duke University Talent Identification Program (Duke TIP) and the LEAP (Launch into Education About Pharmacology) program, a science enrichment program for rising 10th and 11th grade students.
The course could serve as a prototype for other interdisciplinary courses and projects in science education, according to Rachael Brady, Director of the Visualization Technology Group and the DiVE, and who partnered in the course.
“This course was an ideal collaborative learning experience among the undergraduate students and faculty,” commented Brady. “In addition to building the model, the students are developing a way to test how using it in the classroom can improve undergraduates’ learning of basic principles of biology and chemistry, in comparison to the traditional ‘textbook’ style of content delivery. That’s potentially a very real impact for education.”
Students in the DiVE; Photo credit: Les Todd
In another effort to increase student involvement, the Center granted three “Impact Awards” this year to undergraduate research/outreach projects in science education that had demonstrated impacts. One award-winning project, FEMMES (Females Excelling More in Math, Engineering, and Science), is a free, one-day, hands-on science camp held on campus each spring for local female elementary school students in grades four through six. Under the advisement of faculty Gary Ybarra and Helen Hsu-Kim in the Pratt School of Engineering, the program was developed by an undergraduate student, Vicky Weston, as a way to increase young girls’ excitement about and involvement in the sciences. Both female faculty and undergraduate students from across Duke participate as program speakers and mentors in the primarily student-run program.
“The FEMMES program is a microcosm of our goals here at the Center,” remarked Schwartz-Bloom. “It engages scholars at all levels—inquisitive budding scientists, promising undergraduate and graduate students, and accomplished faculty, from various fields—computer science, pharmacology, environmental science, engineering, and others, together for an exciting and interactive experience learning about science.” Next year, the Center will also offer Student Incentive Awards in Science Education, which will provide undergraduate students with $1500 to pursue a science education-related project.
The Center for Science Education was established in 2007 through an award from the Provost’s Common Fund, and recently received a second-year renewal award. In only its first year of engagement, the Center has helped to grow an interdisciplinary network of Duke faculty and students, and K-12 teachers and administrators working in dynamic collaborations to improve science education at all levels, through research, curriculum development, and student training.
April 2008
Provost’s Common Fund winner will give Duke community an opportunity to experience interdisciplinary studies in action.
Image: Roger Fry (1866-1934), "Head of a Model," 1913. Oil on canvas, 34 x 28 inches. Private Collection.
Rarely does an opportunity arise to actively and simultaneously engage departments in the university as diverse as economics, literature, art, psychology, gender studies, theatre and dance, history, and more. Such an opportunity will come to Duke in fall 2008 with the program “Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury”.
Several interdisciplinary colloquia, panel discussions, art exhibits, theatrical performances, and a film series are being planned around the theme of the Bloomsbury Group. The Bloomsbury Group was an informal association of friends in Britain in the first half of the 20th century that included pioneers and leaders in a remarkable number of fields, among them: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, G.E. Moore, Roger Fry, and others.
Courses, both undergraduate and graduate, will also be offered. Julian Bell, a prominent painter and writer, and grandson of Bloomsbury members Vanessa and Clive Bell, is slated to speak at one of the events. The programming for “Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury” is being organized in conjunction with a forthcoming exhibit at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke entitled A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections. The exhibition is being organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in cooperation with the Nasher Museum, and will run from December 2008 through April 2009.
“The Bloomsbury Group successfully achieved interdisciplinarity. They continually challenged conventional wisdom through active and ongoing conversation -- in their art, their writings, their activism as well as in one-on-one conversations in each others’ living rooms. We hope to attract a broad audience to this programming that will take part in many of these events, and will see the recurring themes from different perspectives,” remarked Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics and one of the lead organizers of the Bloomsbury project.
The Bloomsbury project is sponsored in part through the Provost’s Common Fund, an annual competition that awards up to $50,000 each to proposals for innovative scholarly research and artistic activity that clearly crosses the boundaries of departments, schools, and/or interdisciplinary units at Duke.
“This is exactly the kind of project the Provost’s Common Fund was created to support,” noted Susan Roth, Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. “The events being planned around the Bloomsbury theme exemplify Duke’s interest in encouraging and promoting interdisciplinary studies.”
More information on the Provost’s Common Fund is available at http://www.interdisciplinary.duke.edu/funding/common.php.
