Archival Expeditions Fellows Will Incorporate Primary Sources into Course Modules

Kimberley, Jonathan, Joseph.

The Archival Expeditions introduces Duke graduate students to teaching with digital and physical primary sources. Each student partners with a Duke faculty sponsor to design an undergraduate course module that incorporates primary source material tailored to a specific class.  The Archival Expeditions Fellows spend 70-75 hours during a semester consulting with their faculty sponsor, library staff, and other experts and researching, developing, and testing the module. A module can take a variety of shapes and be adjusted to fit different courses, disciplines, and goals of the faculty sponsor.

This year’s cohort consists of three graduate students.

Kimberley Dimitriadis

Kimberley is a third-year graduate student in the English department. Her research interests include Victorian literature and culture, the history of science and mathematics, and novel theory. She will be working with Dr. Charlotte Sussman on “Doctors’ Stories,” an undergraduate course that investigates fiction and theory written about doctors and the discipline of medicine from the eighteenth century to the present day. It explores stories doctors tell about themselves, and the stories that have been told about them. She plans to use historical objects, manuscripts, and advertisements to help students understand how the fictions they’ve encountered in the classroom are supported by the physical instruments and documentation in circulation prior to or at the time of writing.

Jonathan Hornrighausen

Jonathan is a second-year graduate student in Religious Studies. His research interests include Scripture, art, and interreligious dialogue. He will be working with Dr. Marc Brettler on the course “The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible,” an introduction to the Hebrew Bible from a non-confessional, historical-critical perspective. His module aims to help students in the course understand the impact of the Hebrew language’s structure and writing system on how the Hebrew Bible has changed over time as a text and a material artifact.  One major aim will be for students to engage in transcription exercises based on the practices used by the Dead Sea scribes, the Masoretes, and contemporary Jewish scribes.

Joseph Mulligan

Joseph is a fourth-year graduate student in Romance Studies. His research engages with late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures of Hispanic America and explores the proliferation of allegory in modernist aesthetics. He will be working with Dr. José María Rodríguez García on the course “Introduction to Spanish Literature II,” a survey of major writers and movements of the Spanish literary tradition in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.  He will be drawing materials from digital archives, such as Biblioteca Digital Hispánica (Biblioteca Nacional de España), Biblioteca Digital de Castilla y León, and HathiTrust, as well as holdings from the Rubenstein, Perkins, and Lilly Libraries at Duke. Focusing on pedagogical missions, this module will highlight the challenges of modernization which the government of the Second Spanish Republic addressed in 1931 with the creation of the Board of Pedagogical Missions led by Manuel Bartolomé Cossío.

Applications will be available on the Duke Libraries website in the spring for the fall 2020 cohort.

Originally published on the Duke Libraries website

Humanities Research Comes to Life at the Story+ Symposium on June 26

Story+ teams.

All are welcome at the 2019 Story+ Humanities Research Symposium, when Story+ teams will present their final products and/or research works-in-progress.

Story+ is a six-week summer research experience for undergraduates and graduate mentors interested in bringing academic research to life through dynamic storytelling.

This year, ten Story+ teams are unboxing curious artifacts in the Duke archives (including a lock of Walt Whitman’s hair!), uncovering telling facts of social history at Duke and beyond (including its “stained” tobacco pasts), and remixing content into literary exhibitions, environmental podcasts, educational materials, 3D-printed stamps, musical liner notes, and social justice image archives.

Their topics range from asylums to feminisms to 19th-century social media stars, and their products range from podcasts to pedagogical materials. Their methods include textual analysis, visual analysis, archival/historical research, social media research, narrative analysis, cultural analysis, creative work, artistic practice, oral history, writing, and embodied performance.

Story+ symposium.
Wednesday, June 26, 12:00-3:30; lunch starts at 11:45 and program begins at 12:00. Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, C105, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University

Story+ is offered through the Franklin Humanities Institute and Bass Connections, with support from the Duke University Libraries and Versatile Humanists at Duke.

Learn more about the teams on the FHI website as well as Instagram (which is taken over by the teams during Story+) at @DukeStoryPlus. Schedule updates will be posted on the FHI Duke Calendar and Facebook event pages.

New Program to Expand Career Opportunities for Ph.D. Students

NEH Logo MASTER_082010

Duke is giving humanities doctoral students new career paths

Durham, NC – With the help of a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Duke University is creating a program that will enhance the curriculum and expand career opportunities for doctoral students in the humanities.

The three-year grant from the NEH will be matched with a similar amount of funding from the university.  Duke is one of three recipients of an implementation grant, along with the University of Chicago and the University of Delaware.

The program will support skills training relevant for both academic and non-academic career paths, a wide array of new internship opportunities, and curricular innovations that incorporate collaborative research, computational humanities/media, and engagement with policy analysis.

“Duke has made significant investments in interdisciplinary doctoral education for the humanities and interpretive social sciences, as well as resources for career development,” said Ed Balleisen, vice provost for interdisciplinary studies and one of the co-directors of the grant. “We intend to use the NEH grant to amplify the most effective innovations at Duke and to integrate each of these pieces into a more cohesive whole.”

Added Paula D. McClain, the dean of Duke’s Graduate School, “We want to prepare our doctoral students to make a difference, whether within academia, in NGOs, in government agencies or the private sector. From the moment our students arrive on campus, we are working to help them explore and prepare for a wide range of career possibilities.”

These efforts will involve a variety of resources and partners, including:

  • A competitive grants process to encourage Duke departments to develop and test new curricular ideas.
  • Competitive paid internships that offer students relevant perspectives on their dissertation research, as well as experience in project management. Duke will partner with such organizations as RTI International, the National Humanities Center, the American Historical Association and local museums, including the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and the Durham History Hub.
  • Duke alumni, who will provide networking opportunities, advise students on career paths and explore internships outside of academia.
  • A full-time “navigator” position to support students as they consider co-curricular opportunities and weigh career options, and to help faculty, departmental leaders and alumni similarly support students.

The grant will facilitate partnerships across campus, linking departmental graduate programs to the Graduate School, the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke Libraries, the Social Sciences Research Institute, the Career Center and to Bass Connections, a university-wide initiative that brings together faculty and students of all levels to engage in research to tackle societal challenges.

Since 2003, roughly half of Duke’s Ph.D. recipients in the humanities and interpretive social sciences have found tenure-track positions teaching at colleges and universities. A growing number of graduate students have expressed interest in expanding their training to incorporate such arenas as social entrepreneurship or policy analysis.

“In recent years, we have engaged in efforts to prepare students for non-academic careers, but we can do much more to expand intellectual horizons, extend analytical skills and foster a cultural transformation in how we envisage the societal impacts of humanistic expertise,” said Deborah Jenson, director of the Franklin Humanities Institute and the other co-director of the grant.

“This comprehensive program will establish intellectual versatility as a core goal of our doctoral training,” she added.

Originally published on DukeToday

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