Duke University Center for African and African American Research

The Center partnered with several programs at Duke.


1) The John Hope Franklin Young Scholars Program introduces high-potential middle schoolers—mostly members of under-represented minorities—to the highest principles and most vivid examples of university research, paving their path toward college. Michaeline Crichlow and David Stein, Co-chairs.


2) Our Monthly Lecture Series (Karin Shapiro and Fred Boadu, Co-Chairs) and an Annual Scholarly Conference are free and open to the public. The fall 2012 Global Affirmative conference will examine affirmative action and its counterparts around the world.  This conference will be the first of a historic Memorandum of Understanding between the Center and the University of Malaya.  Scholars from the US , Malaysia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Fiji--among other key settings of affirmative action--will address the diverse experiences and effects of these policies.  (Michaeline Crichlow, Chair).


3) Each year, CAAAR hosted one Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Professor in African and/or African-diaspora research. Ideally, scholars would teach one or two courses at Duke, advise students, and make major progress on a scholarly publishing or film making project. 


3) Our Newsletter and Website featured events, images, incisive scholarly analysis, and resources of interest to other Center programs and to the general public. Michaeline Crichlow, Editor, Bernice Patterson, Managing Editor.


4) CAAAR produces films intended to invigorate public debates about African and African-diaspora life with imagery and with the best of scholarly theory and research. Under CAAAR sponsorship, the Lambda Omega Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority shot “The Legacy of Lagos,” documenting the lives of their Nigerian-American peers. “Can We Talk? Bridges between the Humanities and the Social Sciences”  recorded and amplified the Center’s spring 2010 scholarly conference. Scenes from popular films and footage of real-world crises will illustrate our debates and conclusions. The film is intended especially to make the lessons of the humanities and the social sciences available for a more thoughtful public policy. “Orisha: A New World Religion” will reveal the family of pro-found and gorgeous African-inspired religions around the Atlantic. We have worked with the Office of Research Support to solicit major production funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

On 13-15 October 2011 the Center's scholarly conference, "Human Traffic: Past and Present,"  brought together a group of national and international scholars, social scientists and activists as well as humanists  to address questions of the ways in which human trafficking is related to a liberal political economy, the extent to which it implicates broader struggles and forces immanent in fields of globalization, development and migration. In particular, serious attention was given on the bodily politics of trafficking and its links to strategies of domination and resistance, law, disorder and practices of flight and shelter.  

On 8-10 November 2012, "Global Affirmative Action" analyzed and compared affirmative action programs internationally and detail both reforms and the conflicts they have engendered. 

5) One of the major outreach strategies of the Center for African and African American Research will be a museum exhibition presenting the best of Africanist and African-Americanist scholarship to the public.  The final product is the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic web site

  • JHFYS Program 2010
  • jhfys immersion 1