In an editorial published in this morning’s Providence Journal, Ambassador Patrick D. Duddy, visiting lecurer in international studies at the Duke University Center for International Studies, strongly advocates for a renewed focus on Latin America and the Western Hemisphere as the highest of U.S. foreign policy priorities. [more »]

  diplomacy, foreign policy, Latin America, Patrick Duddy

Wendy Ewald, artist-in-residence at the Duke University Center for International Studies, has won a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, adding to her long list of previous honors, which include a MacArthur Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation and the Fulbright Commission.

Since 1998, Ewald has been artist-inresidence at DUCIS. She also directs the Literacy through Photography International program.

The Guggenheim awards were announced on Tuesday. Ewald will begin her fellowship project in 2013. During the fellowship period, Ewald and Elizabeth Barret will lea a creative collaboration in photography and media entitled Portraits and Dreams: A Revisitation.

Ewald began her early career working with students in rural Kentucky during 1975–1982. While making films exploring Appalachian themes, Barret worked with Ewald at the Kingdom Come School, one of the last one-room schools in Kentucky.  The photographs and writing resulting from those years was collected in the book Portraits and Dreams, published in 1985.

  art, Arts, grant, Literacy Through Photography, photography, Wendy Ewald

Author and historian Amitav Ghosh will present the Second-Annual Lecture in Comparative World History, entitled “China and the Making of Modern India: A Story of Fantasy, Abuse and Recovered Memory,” on Wednesday, April 25.

The effects of opium on 18th and 19th century China have been extensively studied and it is now widely acknowledged that the drug trade had momentous consequences, for China and for the world at large. That this trade also had a powerful impact on India, which was the world’s leading opium-producing country under the British Raj, has been largely overlooked (or delibarately ignored). This talk will explore some aspects of this subject, including Chinese influences on Indian arts, crafts, tastes and styles.

The talk will begin at 4pm in the Franklin Humanities Institute Garage, Room C105, Bay 4 in the 1st Floor of the Smith Warehouse and is free and open to the public. The Annual Lecture in Comparative World History is held in honor and celebration of the work of Professor John F. Richards. The 2012 Lecture is sponsored by the Duke University Center for International Studies, the Duke University Center for South Asia Studies and the Office of Global Strategies and Programs.

[more »]

  Amitav Ghosh, Asia, China, human rights, India

Joe Sacco, a Portland, Oregon-based journalist and acclaimed graphic novelist will speak on the subject of Comics and Journalism on the evening of April 24. The talk, which begins at 5pm in the Richard White Lecture Hall on Duke’s East Campus, is free and open to the public. [more »]

  Arts, ethics, Europe, Globalization and the Artist, human rights, Joe Sacco, journalism, Middle East

The faculty and staff of the Duke University Center for International Studies are deeply saddened by the passing of Mrs. Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans. From the very moment at which DUCIS was established, Mrs. Semans has been an ardent champion and impassioned partner in the cause of international studies at Duke. Directly responsible for the creation and ongoing support of the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies as well as DUCIS’ Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Jr. Lecture on International Studies, Mrs. Semans will be deeply missed.

More information: Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, her life and Duke University’s planned memorial services.

  art, Biddle lecture, Duke University, Franklin Center, Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, memory

DUCIS Artist-in-Residence Wendy Ewald, drawing upon the Literacy Through Photography methodology that she developed to teach schoolchildren reading and storytelling skills, has authored a new guide for educators seeking to promote critical thinking, self-expression, and respect in the classroom. [more »]

  Literacy Through Photography, photography, publications, Wendy Ewald

On Wednesday, October 5, in the Gothic Reading Room of Duke University’s Perkins Library, Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist, and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman will read from his new memoir, Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). This is the sequel to his award-winning book, Heading South, Looking North, which was the basis for the documentary A Promise to the Dead, short-listed for the Oscars in 2009.

Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Chair of Literature and Latin American Studies at the Duke University Center for International Studies, is one of the world’s most politically engaged contemporary authors. Once a member of Salvador Allende’s administration in Chile, he went into exile when Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973. Since then, his writings have often examined human rights abuses, the impact of totalitarian governments and ideology on individuals, and the experience of life in exile.

Copies of the book will be available, for professor Dorfman to sign following the event.

[more »]

  Ariel Dorfman, art, chile, democracy, human rights, Latin America, literature

The Duke University Center for International Studies and the John Hope Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies are pleased to announced the opening of:

Pati
photographs by
Sohrab Hura

October 6th, 5.30 p.m.-7.00 p.m.
Franklin Center
2204 Erin Road
Duke University
Durham, NC

This is the first in an annual series of collaborations with the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, of which, Hura was a 2010 awardee. He has his B.A. Honors and M.A. both in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics and has been the recipient of numerous Indian and international awards for his work including Indian Press Photo awards, China International Press Photography award and an honorable mention from Yann Geffroy. His worked has shown in Bangladesh, Japan, India, Cambodia, England, Switzerland and France. To date his focus has been on long-term projects such as the current show.

Pati explores the Indian government’s attempts to bring increased prosperity to rural areas. Only very recently has the economic boom of India begun to reach its citizens in rural areas who suffer some of the worst poverty conditions in the world and need such progress the most. Over three-fourths of India’s poor live in rural areas, with a majority of this population working as day agricultural laborers for less than a dollar a day. The introduction of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in 2005, which guarantees rural citizens 100 days of paid public work, began the first large government support system of the rural poor. But when water supplies are often a several mile journey, health care is a full day’s walk, and agricultural yield has steadily fallen due to global warming, this economic transformation of rural India is not only a long journey, but opens clashes between public and private interests and between potential workers and employers. Many rural worker still know nothing about the 2005 law, find that employers are slow with payments and that these short-term opportunities are adverse to local education and other social programs.

Hura’s photographs are a compelling narrative of the poors’ struggle to survive in this region of rural India.

The show is open 9.00 am to 5.00 pm, Monday through Friday and runs until October 16th.

For additional information, contact Rob Sikorski, r.sikorski [Email: r.sikorski #AT# duke.edu ]

  Arts, Asia, ethics, Franklin Center, gallery exhibition, human rights, India, Magnum Foundation, photography, poverty

Documentary photographer and artist, Jonathan Hyman, who took part in the Duke University Center for International Studies’ panel “Artistic and Visual Responses to 9/11 and Other Disasters“ and whose work is on exhibit at Perkins Library through October 16, 2011, has been featured in The New York Times, both in print – in Sunday, September 11th’s special section entitled “The Reckoning: America and the World a Decade After 9/11″ and online. Hyman also appeared on PBS’ Newshour, to discuss his work.

  art, culture, digital media, Documentary Studies, ethics, history, In the News, terrorism