In the Humanities, the 'Clubhouse' Is a Place of Scholarship

This year, Duke history professor Margaret Humphreys has no classes to teach, no committees to sit on and no department e-mails to scan.

Instead, she commutes to a kind of academic clubhouse tucked away in a patch of woods several miles south of Duke's main campus. There, she works away at her manuscript on medicine in the Civil War, takes advantage of a courier service that brings her items from three area university libraries and breaks for casual lunches with 38 other top humanities scholars from around the country.

The "clubhouse" is the National Humanities Center (NHC), a prestigious nonprofit institute that offers fellowships for humanities scholars to spend a year at the center researching, writing, dining and discussing. And it is quietly nourishing intellectual life at Duke.

This year, Humphreys is one of four Duke professors with NHC fellowships, double the number of any other university. Since NHC opened in 1978, 67 professors from Duke have been awarded fellowships, resulting in the publication of 56 books.

Duke also supports NHC with money and leadership. The university makes an annual contribution to the center ($70,000 this year) and Duke's president is automatically appointed to be an NHC trustee.

After a recent lunch, Humphreys found a seat just beyond the walls of books written by NHC alumni in a cozy lounge and gave an example of how her fellowship has spurred on her research.

She pointed to a seminar she participated in on ancient Roman sexuality -- a subject seemingly distant from medicine in the Civil War, the topic of the book she is working on. In the seminar, she learned that Roman soldiers could be disciplined by being whipped, but only with objects that were not associated with punishing slaves. That gave her an idea for a new line of inquiry for her own research: Were there similar ways that the distinction between slave and soldier was maintained for African Americans who fought in the Civil War?

"That happens pretty often," Humphreys said. "You hear someone talking about their project and it sparks an idea for your own."

Current fellow Joel Marcus, a New Testament professor at Duke's Divinity School, said through talks with NHC colleagues, "I'm getting the sense of larger conversations going on in the humanities." As an example, Marcus pointed to a lunchtime discussion on the day literary critic Jacques Derrida died. Some of the younger scholars at the table argued Derrida's influence had been waning, Marcus said.

Sarah Deutsch, a fellow in 1988-89 and currently the chair of Duke's history department, remembers how she was introduced to cultural theorists such as Michele Foucault during her year at NHC.

"This was the first time I read [cultural] theory at all," she said. "I was a sort of a theory-phobe."

"It made my think about power entirely differently," she said, which affected the book she was writing at the time. Its working title at the beginning of her fellowship was Women of Boston: Gender and the City, 1870-1950, but became Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940.

Intellectual experimentation is a benefit NHC affords the fellows.

Michael Gillespie, a current fellow and Duke political science professor, tried out a talk at NHC this fall that was dually titled, "Things That Go Bump in the Night" or "Is There a German Jewish Professor Under My Bed Reading Plato?"

"You could take all kinds of intellectual risks," said Deutsch, who was on the MIT faculty at the time of her fellowship. "You could ask the stupid questions and there were no witnesses from your home institution or even your field."

The relationship between Duke and NHC goes beyond the sabbaticals a few Duke faculty take there each year.

Having a pool of leading humanities scholars from around the country 15 minutes from campus is a boon to Duke departments. Duke faculty can easily call on fellows to participate in conferences and colloquiums (and the fellows cannot charge for local speaking engagements “ a stipulation of their fellowships).

Orin Starn, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Duke and a NHC fellow in 2001-02, said his department each year invites an anthropologist at NHC to speak. Deutsch said she has the list of NHC fellows up on her bulletin board for browsing as she plans seminars for the spring.

Being the result of "the happy conjunction of three universities that had already explored ways of cooperating," NHC serves as a natural meeting place for collaborations among area universities, says center deputy director Kent Mullikin.

One example is the Triangle Program in Intellectual History. Once a month, faculty and graduate students from Triangle universities gather to examine the history of thought from the perspective of their various disciplines -- political science, history, literature, religion and others. According to Duke history professor Malachi Hacohen, a program coordinator and NHC fellow last year, the group began in 1995 and received a $140,000 Mellon grant through NHC in 1999 for a two-year program of conferences and seminars on "Liberal Cultures and Their Critics." The program continues today to draw on NHC for members and meeting space.

NHC is good for Duke's recruiting, too. A number of Duke's best and brightest, including Professor John Hope Franklin, spent time at NHC before sliding over to Duke (although former Duke professor Robert Keohane says the legend about his NHC fellowship helping in the recruitment of his wife as Duke's president is apocryphal.)

Duke Provost Peter Lange denies that he scans the list of NHC fellows each year looking for faculty from other universities to recruit. However, NHC can indirectly help when a scholar considering Duke spends a year at NHC, becomes comfortable with the area and develops relationships with colleagues at Duke, he said.

Calling NHC the "preeminent humanities center in the nation," Lange places it in a league with other top national "niche" advanced study centers: Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, which focuses on women, gender and society.

"It adds an aura to Duke and the region," he said.