Projects

Meaningful Things: Narrating a Life Through Objects

The human process of making meaning in and of the world is intertwined with the material world; certain objects we engage with become bearers of life’s stories. In this project, we’ll create spaces for reflection on a life, starting with a meaningful object selected by the interviewee.

Follow along as we collect, connect, and share during the 2026-27 academic year.

Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective

Rosetta Reitz was a 20th century feminist writer, business owner, and record and concert producer. She produced nearly 20 albums of the music of the early women of jazz and the blues. She also wrote a mushroom cookbook and a book about menopause, and produced multiple live multi-artist productions and presented multimedia lectures about the history of women performing the blues.

We are a multidisciplinary, intergenerational research collective comprising archivists, a professional singer/songwriter, academic research staff with sociocultural anthropology and digital humanities expertise, and graduate and undergraduate students from across a variety of schools and disciplines at Duke University.

Our project is supported by Bass Connections, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI), and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library in addition to the Forum @ FHI.

Haiti Comics

Historian Laurent Dubois worked with Haitian artist Rocky Cotard to create a comic book about the Haitian Revolution for use in K-12 and college classrooms.

“The Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti” is available to read online, to download as a PDF, and for purchase in print in English, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese.