The Rights and Humanities Annual Series is jointly sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) and the Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI. The series was launched in 2019 to address the links between ideas of rights and the humanities - and to more fully explore the intellectual possibilities of housing a human rights center within a humanities institute. Previous lectures have focused on neoliberalism and the language of human rights (Joseph Slaughter), on water and rights (Sharmila Murthy), and on academic freedom (Joan Scott).
Past Lectures
H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr., a noted legal historian of the Civil Rights Movement, joined the Duke Law faculty in June 2020 from Indiana University where he was a professor of law at the Maurer School of Law and affiliated faculty in the Department of History. Lovelace's work examines how the civil rights movement in the United States helped to shape international human rights law. He has published articles in journals including the Law and History Review, American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of American History, and his article, "William Worthy's Passport," was selected for the 2015 Law & Humanities Interdisciplinary Junior Scholar Workshop. His forthcoming book, The World is on Our Side: The U.S. and the U.N. Race Convention (Cambridge University Press), examines how U.S. civil rights politics shaped the development of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.