Forum Online

Restorying the Native Southeast

By Nikki Locklear

We are living within a hopeful era seeking to reunite Carolina peoples with their ancestors in what I consider the closest manner yet. For the first time in generations, Carolina Natives are publicly speaking languages their ancestors understand, playing games they recognize, uncovering histories they remember, and reintroducing themselves to the land they stewarded. I heard the term “blood memory” used more than once by those doing this work. It resonated.

Frustrating Intimacies: A Week with the Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective

By Dr. Sophie Yates

On an unusually warm spring day in Durham, North Carolina, I visit the Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective’s table at the Bass Connections Showcase at Duke University. The Collective (now completing its third year) is a vibrant, student-centered effort at critically evaluating Reitz’s dogged attempts to preserve the voices and lives of early-twentieth-century blues performers. I’ve been invited to learn more about this research group’s work

Reclaiming History: Memory beneath the Atlantic

By Robert Wallace

It is in the context of water’s dualistic nature that Stephen L. Hayes, Esbenshade assistant professor of the practice of art, and Javier Wallace, instructor in the education program, have partnered to create the project “Reclaiming the Current.” This project aims to identify not only the many bodies of water for which the African diaspora were transported, but to lay claim to the truth for which the currents brought them.

It is in the transformation … that “Reclaiming the Current” not only asserts its claim on the waters that brought Africans forcibly away from their homes, but demands a right to history itself.

People Weavers

By Hannah Jorgensen

Revisiting the past conversation with Biss opened me up to vampires and vaccination, Shakespeare and metaphor. This is the return to the archive: to go back over, to add, to build, revisit and reimagine. The Forum calls itself “people weavers,” and I’ve been woven into their tapestry.

Introducing Kelsey Desir, Our 2024-25 Public Scholarship Fellow

“I understood from a young age that it is important to circulate knowledge throughout your community. My work is primarily housed in the discipline of English, but when I think about my research, I see it first and foremost as Black feminist work. And Black feminism is a world-making project.”

Reflecting on “Recollections,” a workshop about memorials and memorial museums

By Melissa Karp, Doctoral Candidate in Literature and the 2023-24 Anne Firor Scott Public Scholarship Fellow

Melissa Karp, Doctoral Candidate in Literature and the 2023-24 Anne Firor Scott Public Scholarship Fellow, reflects on the workshop, “Recollections: Workshop: Practice, Critique, and Coalition Through the Memorial Museum,” hosted by the Forum on April 5, 2024.

Ecologies of Song

By Thea Ballard, Doctoral Candidate, Duke University Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

In this essay, doctoral candidate Thea Ballard takes up the mission of the Forum to bring programs at Duke into conversation with programs in the surrounding community, exploring the Nasher’s recent exhibit, “Spirit in the Land,” and Black Belt Eagle Scout’s performance at the Pinhook in downtown Durham.

Exit Interview with Elizabeth Schrader Polczer

By Margaret "Lou" Brown

I would say to other PhD students who hold this fellowship: Maximize the opportunity! Be creative and think big. Make it into something that pushes your boundaries as a scholar and as a contributor to the public conversation. Because once you go into the academic world and become a professor, you might not have this kind of safe training space again, where you have the room to do what you want to do.

Abbas Benmamoun on his writing practice

By Sylvia Miller, Senior Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing and Special Projects, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute

Phrases and sentences and how they work, how children acquire knowledge of linguistic structures, the nature of linguistic variation, and the core that languages share—these are some of the themes that fascinate Abbas Benmamoun as he studies classical and spoken varieties of Arabic and compares them to other languages.