New Partnership with the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism

Submitted by Christina Chia on Wed, 10/17/2012 - 9:08am
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logo-fhi-330x65.jpglogo-jwtc-330x65.jpgUpdate 2/18/13: The CFP for 2013 JWTC Summer Session funding is now out. Duke faculty and graduate students are encouraged to apply. Deadline is March 18, 2013. See details here.

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We are very pleased to announce a new partnership between the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC). Based at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), the JWTC was founded in 2008 as a place for experimenting with theory in the global South. Its goal is to open questions that are fundamental to contemporary aesthetic, philosophical, political, literary, ethnographic and ethical inquiry – questions that potentially point to new paths for critical theory at the interface of local and global circuits. The Workshop is co-convened by Wits faculty Achille Mbembe (also Visiting Professor of Romance Studies at Duke), Kelly Gillespie, and Julia Hornberger.

The partnership will connect the FHI and JWTC through three primary mechanisms: 

  • Support for Duke faculty and PhD student participation in the JWTC Annual Summer Workshop, which brings professors and advanced graduate students together from across the global North and South for an intensive 10-day program;
  • Partnership with the JWTC's online journal The Johannesburg Salon and proposed new print journal Southern Theory;
  • Collaboration on "Southern Theory & Global Humanities," a project-in-development designed for South African graduate students and young scholars.

We are excited by this opportunity to deepen the institutional as well as intellectual connection between the FHI/Duke and JWTC/Wits. The Duke Graduate Student CFP for the 2013 Summer Workshop should be out by February - please check back with us for more information.