Polly Ha on a Hidden World of Dissent and Forbidden Manuscripts

Polly Ha sitting at a desk with a large archival book
Polly Ha with one of the Declaration of Independence manuscripts

This is a summary of a story on the Office for Faculty Advancement site.

Polly Ha is associate professor in the Duke Divinity School and the Department of History in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, and a Provost Faculty Fellow. She is now a faculty director for Transformative Ideas, a Trinity College program that supports the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry and Belonging.

What first got you interested in your field?

I grew up in California. Suddenly, as an undergraduate, I found myself immersed in a new culture across the country. I was curious about early New England history. 

Before I knew it, I was digging up an underworld of Puritan dissent and finding manuscripts that were not supposed to exist. Some were so seditious that they were encrypted in code. This got me thinking in new ways about everything from freedom and religion to how we inhabit time and think with the past.

You have a new book coming out. What’s it about?

“The Future of Freedom” started out as a bottom-up history of the English Revolution. I was peering into some of the earliest debates over “independence” in the English-speaking world. 

Men, women and even adolescents were worried about their futures. They were stretching the boundaries of freedom. They were diversifying their thinking by drawing on medieval Hebrew-Arabic sources. 

Tell us about the undergraduate program Transformative Ideas.

Transformative Ideas was designed to bridge across disciplines and differences, and to connect conversations in the classroom with residential life.

We have a cluster of classes concentrated in the fall semester of the sophomore year. We also have an LLC dorm, and a house course, that anyone can join beyond their second year. The students in our dorm host regular movie nights and guest speakers. We also partner with others to host events, colloquia and public lectures on enduring questions that cut across different times and cultures.

For the full story, go to the Office for Faculty Advancement site.

Oct. 29 Symposium: We the People Believe: Freedom, Religion and Pluralism

As part of We the People, Transformative Ideas is partnering with others to feature keynote speaker Eboo Patel, founder of Interfaith America and faith leaders on campus. 

The symposium will also cover research by Duke faculty on freedom, religion and pluralism, including Polly Ha’s discovery of the earliest debates over independence in the English-speaking world.