Directory and Contact Information

Director Srinivas Aravamudan, Professor of English, gained his PhD at Cornell University and has taught at the University of Utah, and at the University of Washington. He joined the Duke English Department in the Fall of 2000. He specializes in eighteenth century British and French literature and in postcolonial literature and theory. He is the author of essays in Diacritics, ELH, Social Text, Novel, South Atlantic Quarterly and other venues. His study, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999, Duke University Press) won the outstanding first book prize of the Modern Language Association in 2000. He has also edited Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings of the British Romantic Period: Volume VI Fiction (1999, Pickering and Chatto). His book, Guru English: South Asian Religion in A Cosmopolitan Language was published by Princeton University Press in January 2006. He is working on two book-length studies, one on the eighteenth-century French and British oriental tale, and the other on sovereignty and anachronism. His edition of William Earle's antislavery romance, entitled Obi: or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack appeared in 2005 with Broadview Press. Aravamudan was co-convener of the 2002-03 FHI Seminar, Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory.

203 Franklin Center
919.668.0337
srinivas@duke.edu
Prof. Aravamudan's website

Associate Director Grant Samuelsen came to the Institute in 2005. Grant has worked since 1992 in and around the development and management of programs in the visual and performing arts, humanities, and media. Before coming to the Franklin Humanities Institute, he served as Assistant Director at the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has worked in development, programming, and education at Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Pittsburgh Symphony. As a curator at Washington Project for the Arts and in independent practice, he was responsible for over 20 solo and group exhibitions of contemporary art. He was the publisher of the Chicago-based visual arts magazine New Art Examiner as well as Executive Director of its parent organization, the Chicago New Art Association.

Grant has also worked as an independent project development consultant, fundraising consultant, editor and writer for several commercial and nonprofit entities and projects, including the Axial Pictures production of Karen Armstrong's A History of God (A+E Television, 2002). He has published reviews and feature articles in New Art Examiner, In the Loop, and Non-Stop Banter magazines. He served as Assistant Editor of Money to Work II: Funding for Visual Artists, as editor of the NAAO Bulletin for the National Association of Artists’ Organizations, and he was the founding publisher and editor of Projector, a critical guide to culture in Chicago.

Grant holds a Masters in Public Management from the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

205 Franklin Center
919.684.6469
grant.samuelsen@duke.edu

Assistant Director for Programs and Communications Christina Chia joined the Franklin Humanities Institute staff in September 2006. Chris received her Ph.D. in English from Duke in 2004. Her dissertation traces the prehistory of the concept "people of color" in the 19th- and early 20th-century United States. Before coming to the FHI, Chris was Program Coordinator at the Duke Center for Multicultural Affairs. She has taught courses in Comparative Ethnic studies, Asian American Studies, and American Literature for the Center for Documentary Studies as well as the Department of English, where she currently holds an adjunct appointment. Intellectually, she's a bit of a forager, with interests ranging from the university, critical race/ethnicity studies, animal studies, and, most recently, graphic novels and comics literature.

206 Franklin Center
919.668.1902
christina.chia@duke.edu

Cathy N. Davidson is the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English. From 1998 to 2006, she served as Duke University’s (and the nation’s) first Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In this capacity, she had administrative responsibility for over sixty research programs that operate between and among Duke’s nine academic and professional schools. During that time, she and Dean Karla F. C. Holloway co-founded the Franklin Humanities Institute. She continues to lecture and consult widely on interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and innovative learning-applications of new technologies. She is past President of the American Studies Association and past editor of the journal American Literature. She is also a co-founder, with David Theo Goldberg, of HASTAC (pronounced “haystack,” an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). Davidson is the author or editor of eighteen books. Among the most recent is Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (a collaboration with documentary photographer Bill Bamberger), recipient of the Mayflower Cup Award for Non-Fiction. With Ada Norris, she edited American Indian Stories, Legends and Other Writings by Zitkala-Sa, the first Penguin Classic devoted to a Native American author. Recently, she published an Expanded Edition of Revolution and the Word: The Rise of theNovel in America (originally published by OUP in 1986) and an updated edition of her classic work of travel writing, Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan. She is on the Board of Advisors for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s new initiative on Digital Media and Learning, and, along with Goldberg, is a recipient of MacArthur grants to write a monograph on “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age” (forthcoming) and to run the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. She is presently working on two studies, a literary and historiographic analysis of Olaudah Equiano and another on cognition and learning.

Stephanie Grant is currently Visiting Writer at the Franklin Humanities Institute. Stephanie is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program where she studied with Mona Simpson.  Her first novel, The Passion of Alice, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1995, and was nominated for Britain’s Orange Prize for Women Writers and the Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Fiction.  In 1998, she was the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Her second novel, Map of Ireland, is set in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1974, during the desegregation of the public schools.  The book is a bildungsroman that explores the ambivalent moral agency of a young white woman at a critical moment in American history. This work has received four awards to support its writing and development: The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Award,  the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award, and, an Individual Artists Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council. Map of Ireland is forthcoming from Scribner in the spring of 2008.

Click here for more information about Stephanie Grant's Jan 23, 2008 talk Researching the Novel: the Problem of Serendipity.

sjg13@duke.edu

Madina Tlostanova is currently Visiting Scholar at the Franklin Humantiies Institute and Professor of Comparative Politics at the People's Friendship University in Moscow, Russia. Dr. Tlostanova's fields of interests, research and teaching, include trans-cultural subjectivities and aesthetics, as expressed in literature, cinema, arts, the culture of the quotidian; racism in the global context and particularly in the post-socialist world and the Russian ex-colonies - Central Asia and Caucasus; gender issues in non-eastern contexts; feminist theory and Eurocentrism. Among her recent publications are "The Imperial Chronotope: Istanbul-Baku-Khurramabad", in Cultural Studies 21/3, 2007; "The Imagined Freedom: Post-Soviet Intellectuals between the Hegemony of the State and the Hegemony of the Market", South Atlantic Quarterly, 105/3, 2006; "Life in Samarkand: Caucasus and Central Asia vis-á-vis the West and Islam", Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Knowledge, V/1, 2006; "Theorizing from the Borders, Shifting to Geo- and Body Politics of Knowledge", European Journal of Social Theory, 9/2, 2005, with Walter Mignolo. Dr. Tlostanova is currently working on a book-length manuscript on gender, race and religion in Central Asia and the Caucasus .