Welcome to the newly minted website for Humanities Futures!
Based at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke, Humanities Futures is a multi-year Mellon-funded initiative that seeks to explore possible futures of the humanities – in theory and practice, in research, teaching, and other dimensions of institutional life – after the transformative interdisciplinary developments of recent decades. A fuller description of the grant, which involves a number of different institutional partners at Duke and beyond, can be found here.
One key dimension of the grant is this website itself. In the first year of the Humanities Futures (2014-15), the FHI, in conjunction with Duke’s academic departments in the humanities, arts, and interpretive social sciences, solicited “think pieces” on the states and directions of knowledge formation in the humanities: in the current moment of heightened exchange with the sciences as well as in the context of vital, ongoing re-configurations and contestations around critical theory, social difference, etc.
In this initial launch phase of the website, we will be “rolling out” guest scholar contributions from the past year. What you see on the site right now is only a portion of the papers (in some cases only abstracts, with full papers soon to come) and media materials. Please check back frequently for new works!