Duke's John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute has named the fellows for its eighth annual Franklin Seminar in the Humanities, to be focused in 2006-07 on the intersections of the humanities, sciences, arts, and cognition under the title "Interface."
The Interface seminar, convened by Duke Professors Timothy Lenoir, Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society, and Priscilla Wald, professor of English and Women's Studies, will engage 16 scholars in the study of the interactions between digital and physical realities. Investigating the degree to which the world may be entering a "posthuman" era where physical embodiment fuses with digital simulation, the seminar will experiment with the application of such technologies as game-based learning and virtual reality to humanistic inquiry.
Lenoir's work has focused on the history of biomedical science from the 19th century to the present, with recent attention to the introduction of computers into biomedical research beginning in the 1960s. Lenoir has also been engaged in constructing online digital libraries for a number of projects, including an archive on the history of Silicon Valley. With several economists, he has just completed a collaborative study called Inventing the Entrepreneurial Region: Stanford and the Co-Evolution of Silicon Valley.
Wald studies 18th- to 20th-century U.S. literature and culture, and focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science and medicine. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. She is also an associate editor of American Literature as well a member of the Advisory Committee of the PMLA and the editorial board of Literature and Medicine.
During their year at the Humanities Institute, all of the seminar members will pursue individual research projects that engage specific areas of investigation related to the larger Seminar theme. Additionally, they will teach or develop new courses related to their work in the seminar, while engaging in dialogue with undergraduate students involved in game design and theory.
Including the co-conveners, the Seminar includes eight faculty members from Arts and Sciences departments, one fellow from Perkins Library, three research fellows, three advanced graduate student fellows, and one post-doctoral fellow. The fellows come from 12 different Duke departments and programs and will have offices in the John Hope Franklin Center for the 2005-06 academic year.
In addition to the two co-conveners, the seminar fellows will be Anne Allison, professor and chair of the Department of Cultural Anthropology, who will study the incursions of electronically generated intimacy and prosthetic sociality into Japanese toys and youth culture; Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. Devarney Professor of English, who will investigate the social history of the scientific and educational categories of "learning disabilities" and "giftedness"; G¼ven G¼zeldere, associate professor of philosophy and associate professor of psychological and brain sciences and neurobiology, who will explore the impact of cyborg technologies, non-human animals and robots; Andrew Janiak, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Philosophy, who will work on his book for Cambridge University Press called Newton and Modern Philosophy; Robert Mitchell, assistant professor of English, who will pursue his interest in the embodiment of information through several projects, including a book that considers intersections of biological research and "new media" and art; and Kristine Stiles, associate professor of art and art history, who will bring into the seminar her ongoing discussion with a Bryn Mawr neurobiologist about the intersections between the body's awareness of itself in space and body art.
The seminar also traditionally includes a fellow from the Duke library system. This year's library fellow is Paolo Mangiafico, digital projects consultant, Academic Technology and Instructional Services. Mangiafico will explore the social, economic, and political transformations stemming from the widespread adoption of new, technologically facilitated, models of large-scale collaboration (open-source software development or projects like Wikipedia, for instance).
New for 2006-07, the seminar will also include three research fellows: Marilyn Lombardi, a consultant in the Office of Information Technology, who brings an expertise in emerging technologies; Rachael Brady , research scientist in electrical and computer engineering, who specializes in scientific visualization projects; and Mark Olson, director of new media and information technologies at the John Hope Franklin Center, whose background includes graduate work in cultural studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Orit Halpern, who received a Ph.D. in the History of Science in 2006 from Harvard University, will also participate as a post-doctoral fellow.
Three Duke graduate students, David Un-Hsien Liu , Jennifer Rhee and Mitali Routh will round out the seminar.
"These fellows will break new ground with respect to interdisciplinarity," said Srinivas Aravamudan, Franklin Humanities Institute Director. "By systematically engaging humanistic questions in the light of recent developments in science, information technology and new media, this Seminar will reconnect the sciences and the humanities in exciting and ambitious ways."
The Institute's annual seminar will be conducted in close coordination with a series of programs to be presented by the international consortium HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) throughout the year. In addition to a series of monthly events, HASTAC will convene a major gathering of humanists, scientists, and technologists in April 2007, in partnership with the Interface seminar.
The seminar will also work closely with the FHI-sponsored A.W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer seminar, Human Being, Human Diversity, Human Welfare: A Cross-Disciplinary and Cross-Cultural Study in Culture, Science, and Medicine, also convened by Lenoir and Wald.
Since 1999, the Franklin Humanities Institute has supported and shared the work of nearly one hundred Duke scholars in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. The seminar annually hosts a number of speakers and other special events related to the group's work.