Robin Kirk

Robin Kirk is the Faculty Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute and is a founding member of the Pauli Murray Project. An author and human rights advocate, Kirk directed the Belfast program for DukeEngage in partnership with Healing Through Remembering, an extensive cross-community project dealing with the legacy of past conflict and human rights. She is a lecturer in the Department of Cultural Anthropology.

In 2016-2017, she directed a Bass Connections project with undergraduates called Constructing Memory at Duke, which examined how the university embodies its past. A report on its conclusions and recommendations will be released in 2018.

Kirk has also written three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is a coeditor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and coedits Duke University Press’s World Readers series. An essayist and award-winning poet, she has published widely on issues as diverse as the Andes, torture, the politics of memory, family life, and pop culture.