Undergraduate Education Overview

Courses Offered for the Upcoming Semester – Fall 2008 Courses

Current and Past Semester Courses – Spring 2008 Courses

Instructors

Undergraduate Certificate

Documentary Studies Courses and Cross-Listed Courses

Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies

Student Opportunities at CDS




Instructors

Kelly Alexander
kellyalexander9@hotmail.com



Kelly Alexander is a writer based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is a consulting editor to Saveur magazine and the author of numerous feature stories for that publication. Her article “Hometown Appetites,” an homage to the great American food writer Clementine Paddleford, won the James Beard Journalism Award and will be the basis for a biography and cookbook to be published by Penguin in fall 2007. Prior to joining Saveur, Alexander worked as the restaurant editor of Microsoft’s New York Sidewalk and as an assistant editor at Food & Wine magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, and many other publications. Last year her story “Multicultural Meat,” about the cross-cultural significance of brisket, was nominated for a Bert Greene Award for Food Journalism from the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Alexander is also a regular contributor on the subject of food to the NPR program “The State of Things,” which airs daily on WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she studied journalism, creative writing, and anthropology.





Erin Avots
eea4@duke.edu



Erin Avots, the 2005-07 Teaching Fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Duke. She teaches Documentary Research Methods, which combines the methodologies of historical research and documentary fieldwork. Past class topics have included the Duke family and slavery, Spanish-speaking peoples in North Carolina from 1500 to the present, and Duke-Durham town/gown relations. She is currently working on her history dissertation, titled "The Evolution of Race Slavery in Maritime North Carolina, 1650-1750."





John Biewen
jbiewen@duke.edu



During an eighteen-year career, American RadioWorks Correspondent-Producer John Biewen has produced a large body of documentary work for NPR and Public Radio International programs. He harvested onions with migrant farm workers in south Texas, followed Navajo youth gangs in Arizona, and documented the lives of ex-inmates in North Carolina. He reported on Tokyo's changing youth culture and the practice of euthanasia in Holland. In 1997–98, Biewen covered the Rocky Mountain West as a staff reporter for NPR. His recent awards include two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Awards (2000, 2001), the Public Service Award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival (2002), and the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award (2002). Biewen graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, with a degree in philosophy.  In 1985–87 he lived and taught in Osaka, Japan.





David Cline
dpcline@email.unc.edu



David Cline, currently the Walter A. Davis Fellow at the Southern Oral History Program, has an M.A. in U.S. history with a certificate in public history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2003). He is the author of Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Birth Control and Abortion, 1961–1973 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), an edited collection of oral histories documenting pre-Roe v. Wade illegal abortion networks. (For more information about the book, see www.creatingchoice.com.) His public history projects have included work on a National Public Radio documentary on the Korean War in 2002-03 and a 2005 project to create roadside signage to document the Cherokee Trail of Tears. He was a recipient of the National Council on Public History's New Professional Award in 2004. In his doctoral thesis, Cline will explore the roles and legacies of the religious left in 20th century U.S. social change movements.





Wendy Ewald
wendyewald@aol.com



Wendy Ewald is director of Literacy Through Photography, a program of the Center for Documentary Studies that teaches elementary- and middle-school students to express themselves through photography and writing. A senior research associate at CDS, she has been involved in several special projects for teachers and students in the Durham Public Schools. These include Black Self/White Self and American Alphabets, which explore race and ethnicity in America. Ewald has worked as a photographer, teacher, and documentary writer for more than thirty years. She has had exhibitions in major museums in the United States and in Europe. She has published seven books and received many grants and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992. At CDS, Ewald teaches the course Literacy Through Photography: Teaching Photography and Writing in Elementary and Middle Schools; she also has been co-teaching a Duke/UNC course on various approaches to documentary photography since Spring 2003. Her book, I Wanna Take Me a Picture: Teaching Photography and Writing to Children, was published by CDS/Lyndhurst Books and Beacon Press in 2001.





Alex Harris
aharris@duke.edu



Alex Harris, one of the founders of the Center for Documentary Studies, has taught documentary photography and writing at Duke since 1975. Among his books are River of Traps, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction in 1991, and A New Life: Stories and Photographs from the Suburban South. His current work is about contemporary Cuba, aging in America, and the autobiographical impulse in photography. Harris helped to launch the Humanitarian Challenges Focus program at Duke and is currently teaching photographic fieldwork courses related to humanitarian and policy issues. In some courses, such as Advanced Documentary Photography, Harris emphasizes the new digital technology to produce photographs. Harris co-directs the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, a year-long postgraduate fellowship program based at the Center for Documentary Studies. Through the Hine Program recent Duke graduates work with international humanitarian organizations focused on marginalized children. All Hine Fellows complete an in-depth documentary project to benefit the non-governmental organizations and communities with which they work.

Alex Harris's work can be seen on the Web at http://alex-harris.com.





Gary Hawkins
chaircity@usa.net



Gary Hawkins was born and raised in Thomasville, North Carolina. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in fine arts, and the University of Southern California, where he majored in cinema. He joined the directing faculty at the North Carolina School of the Arts, in the School of Filmmaking, in 1991 and taught there until 1999. Hawkins has written and directed six films. His second, The Rough South of Harry Crews, won an Emmy and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Gold Award in 1992. The Rough South of Larry Brown, the latest in Hawkins’s on-going series about working-class Southern authors, was picked by The Oxford American as one of Thirteen Essential Southern Documentaries and was reviewed by Variety as a “beautifully conceived documentary film.” The Rough South of Larry Brown won Best Feature at the Savannah Film & Video Festival, Best Feature at the Ohio Independent Film Festival, and Best Documentary Feature at the Oxford Film Festival. Hawkins’s screenplay DownTime was selected by The Sundance Institute for the Writer’s Lab in the winter of 2000. Presently Hawkins is adapting two novels into screenplays for Capricorn Films.





Frank Hunter
platpal@earthlink.net



Frank Hunter was born in El Paso, Texas, and grew up in the desert Southwest. He has an M.A. in communications from the University of Colorado and an M.F.A. in photography from Ohio University, where he was the John Cady Graduate Fellow in Fine Art. Hunter has taught at the university level for more than twenty years. His interest in photographic process includes the technical process of exposure and development as well as the psychological and spiritual aspects of creating photographic work. Hunter is best known for his landscape photographs done in the nineteenth-century process known as platinum/palladium. His recent work includes a commission done for the Federal Reserve Bank documenting Midtown Atlanta at the turn of the millennium, which was shown at the High Museum in Atlanta in 2003. His work is represented in a number of public and private collections, including the Speed Museum, the Denver Museum of Art, the High Museum, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.





Katie Hyde
kahyde@duke.edu



Katie Hyde is the Durham schools program coordinator for Literacy Through Photography, a program based at the Center for Documentary Studies. In this capacity, she works closely with undergraduate students, community volunteers, and teachers and students in the Durham Public Schools. With Wendy Ewald she teaches a course on Literacy Through Photography that deals with children’s self-expression and with race and gender issues within education. She also teaches a course called Sociology Through Photography, using documentary photography as a tool to see the world through a sociological lens. Hyde earned her doctorate in sociology at North Carolina State University. She has explored how social inequalities are constructed, perpetuated, and resisted through fieldwork and other research on recent Latino/a immigration in North Carolina, women’s activism in Russia, and girls’ education in rural Nepal.





Dante James
dante.james@duke.edu



Dante J. James is an award-winning independent filmmaker and artist-in-residence at Duke University. He recently completed a short dramatic film based on the work of Charles W. Chesnutt. Last fall James won an Emmy award for his work as series producer of the critically acclaimed PBS series Slavery and the Making of America; he received a total of three nominations. In 2003, he executive produced the PBS series This Far by Faith: African American Spiritual Journeys. Earlier in his career, James worked with and produced several films for his friend and mentor, the late renowned filmmaker Henry Hampton, founder of Blackside Films. James's next film, a performance documentary for the PBS series Great Performances, will be shot in Paris, France. The film will explore history's influence on the artistic evolution of jazz music in Paris from 1918 to the 1950s. James is a graduate and distinguished alumnus of Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is also a graduate of Duke University's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program.





Nancy Kalow
eneyekay@yahoo.com



Nancy Kalow is a folklorist and filmmaker who has taught at CDS since 2000. She attended Harvard University (A.B.) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.) and was a Rockefeller Fellow at UNC's University Center for International Studies. She has documented Southern traditional music and material culture, Primitive Baptist preaching and visionary narratives in eastern North Carolina, and the music and religious folklife of the Mexican community in central North Carolina. Two of her video documentaries are online: Sadobabies, winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Special Jury Trophy at the San Francisco Film Festival, and The Losers Club. Her most recent video, The Beginning of the End, was completed in 2006. She has served as co-chair of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival's Selection Committee since 2003.





Barbara Lau
balau@duke.edu



Barbara Lau, Community Documentary Projects Director at the Center for Documentary Studies, is a folklorist, curator, and radio producer. At CDS, she coordinates collaborative work with the Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project and oversees the Youth Document Durham and Youth Noise Network projects. Two recent exhibitions are based on her fieldwork with photographer Cedric N. Chatterley in North Carolina’s Cambodian refugee communities. To accompany these exhibitions, she authored an exhibit catalog and co-authored an award-winning children’s book, Sokita Celebrates the New Year: A Cambodian American Holiday. She has an MA in folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.





Spencie Love
sl1@duke.edu



After graduating from college Spencie Love worked as a journalist for ten years before going on to complete a Ph.D. in American history at Duke University in 1990. She is the author of One Blood: The Death and Resurrection of Charles R. Drew, which focuses on twentieth-century race relations and relies heavily on oral history. Before she began teaching at CDS in 2001, she served as Acting and Assistant Director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina. She is currently working on two book projects. One deals with family history, focusing on five generations of women, and the other is a study of nonviolence built around the life and teaching of the Rev. James M. Lawson, known as the “nonviolent strategist” of the Civil Rights Movement. Love’s courses include Memories of Home: Family Sagas, which offers students the opportunity to conduct oral history interviews and archival and photography research for their own writing projects.





John Moses
moses001@mc.duke.edu



John Moses is a primary care pediatrician at Duke University Medical Center. While he was an undergraduate student at Duke, Moses took a photography class from CDS faculty member Alex Harris. Before attending medical school, he spent a year photographing the conditions of migrant farmworkers in the Southeast. His current projects include a book about primary care medicine and a book about children and illness. His courses include Medicine and the Vision of Documentary Photography, part of the Focus Program, and Children and the Experience of Illness, in which students teach photography to children being treated for illness and write about their experiences during the semester. Of the class, he says, “It has become a way for students to process their own issues with illness.” Moses plans to continue developing other opportunities for undergraduates to work with documentary studies and medicine.




Susie Post-Rust
susie@susiepostrust.com



Susie Post-Rust is a veteran magazine and newspaper photojournalist who has spent the last two decades documenting the lives of people in more than twenty countries. Her passion throughout her career has been in-depth documentary projects that reveal small communities and the people who live in them. For more than ten years she worked for National Geographic magazine, while also contributing to Life, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, and the New York Times, as well as nonprofit charity groups, including World Vision, the North Carolina Food Bank, Food for the Hungry, and Compassion International. She has an MA in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia and a BSBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1986 she was honored with the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Coverage of the Disadvantaged in recognition of her photographic essay Jerry: A Troubled Mind, the story of one man’s battle with Alzheimer’s Disease.





Tom Rankin
docstudies@duke.edu



Tom Rankin is director of the Center for Documentary Studies and associate professor of the practice of art and documentary studies at Duke University. A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, Rankin has been documenting and interpreting American culture for more than twenty years. Formerly associate professor of art and Southern studies at the University of Mississippi and chair of the Art Department at Delta State University, he was educated at Tufts University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Georgia State University. A native of Kentucky, he has curated a number of exhibitions and published numerous articles and reviews on photography and Southern culture. His photographs have been published widely in numerous magazines, journals, and books, and he has exhibited throughout the country. His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; 'Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre': Photographs of a River Life (1995); Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (1997); and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000).





Margaret Sartor
msartor@duke.edu



Margaret Sartor is a photographer, writer, and editor whose past projects include What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney and Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness, which was co-edited with Alex Harris. Her photographs are in many permanent and private collections and have appeared in Aperture, DoubleTake, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, among other publications. At CDS, Sartor teaches the seminar American Communities: A Photographic Approach. In this course, she explains, “Each student has the responsibility of defining his or her own long-term photographic project, and the unpredictable variety of subject matter creates a unique atmosphere—one of mutual astonishment as well as education. But the idea this class embodies, if any, is the importance of paying attention, of gaining an understanding of the way people live by direct observation and experience.” Currently, Sartor’s own work focuses on her family and childhood home of Monroe, Louisiana.





Lisa Satterwhite
lisa.satterwhite@duke.edu



Lisa Satterwhite, an artist and a biologist, holds a B.A. in fine art and art history and an M.S. in zoology from the University of Tennessee and a Ph.D. in cell biology from Johns Hopkins University. A cancer research fellow at Princeton University, where she studied photography in the Program for Visual Arts, she is interested in ties to the land, human health, and social justice. Her current photographic work documents cultural erasure from unrestricted land development in the mountains and explores sense of place, intimacy, and stewardship of water. In her research she is creating new methods to assess whether agricultural pesticides cause birth defects in children of migrant workers.





Christopher Sims
csims@duke.edu



Christopher Sims, who currently designs the CDS Web site, has coordinated the exhibitions and awards programs at CDS, as well as worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. He has an undergraduate degree from Duke, a master’s degree in visual communication from UNC–Chapel Hill, and is currently a candidate for an M.F.A. in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He has received a national fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography, was selected for PDN’s Photography Annual "Best Photography of the Year" in 2007, and was featured in the book American Photography 20, a collection edited by Kathy Ryan of the New York Times Magazine.





Sam Stephenson
sfs4@duke.edu



Sam Stephenson is a writer and a research associate at the Center for Documentary Studies. Since 1997 his research his focused on the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith, and he has published two books on the subject: Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project (W. W. Norton in association with the Center for Documentary Studies, 2001) and W. Eugene Smith, a retrospective of Smith’s career (Phaidon Press, 2001). He also curated a national traveling exhibition of Smith’s Pittsburgh photographs for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Stephenson is currently directing a multifaceted project about a loft building in Manhattan’s flower district that from 1954 to 1964 was a legendary haunt of jazz musicians. Recipient of a 2001–02 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, he is researching Eugene Smith’s extensive photographs and audiotapes of this jazz loft and collecting oral histories of the surviving musicians. Stephenson, a native of Washington, N.C., has degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. His teaching interests include visual and narrative explorations of the built and natural environments and documentary aspects of jazz history and music.

Kerry Taylor
kerryt@email.unc.edu



Kerry Taylor is a native of Lombard, Illinois. He has taught a variety of classes on oral history, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement. Before returning to graduate school he worked as a newspaper reporter, a community organizer, and an editor at the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. He is currently working on his dissertation exploring labor activism in the 1970s.





Charlie Thompson
cdthomps@duke.edu



Charles Thompson, education and curriculum director at CDS, is an adjunct faculty member in the Duke departments of cultural anthropology and religion. He directs the undergraduate program at CDS. He holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, with concentrations in cultural studies, ethnography, and Latin American studies. His particular interests in documentary work fall into the categories of oral history, ethnography, and community activism. A former farmer, he remains immersed in agricultural issues and the cultures that surround our food system. He has written about farmworkers, and he is an advisory board member of Student Action with Farmworkers. His latest book, with Melinda Wiggins, is The Human Cost of Food: Farmworker Lives, Labor, and Advocacy. Currently Thompson is researching the history, culture, and agriculture of the Old German Baptist Brethren in the mountains of Virginia. He has also published a book and several articles on Guatemalan Maya refugees.





Timothy Tyson
timothy.tyson@duke.edu



Timothy B. Tyson, author of the much-acclaimed Blood Done Sign My Name and other award-winning books, is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies and Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture in the Divinity School. Blood Done Sign My Name, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Christopher Award and the North Caroliniana Book Award, was the 2005 selection of the Carolina Summer Reading Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assigned to all new undergraduate students. Tyson’s previous book Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (UNC Press, 1999) won the James Rawley Prize and was co-winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, both from the Organization of American Historians. He also co-edited, with David S. Cecelski, Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (UNC Press, 1998), which won the 1999 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America. Tyson was a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004–05. He is a North Carolina native and a graduate of Duke (M.A. ’91, Ph.D. ’94).





Jeff Whetstone
jeffwhet@email.unc.edu

Jeff Whetstone, a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, has been photographing and writing about the human relationship to the land since he graduated from Duke University in 1990. In 1991, he traveled the migrant farmworker stream throughout the southeastern United States and in the Rio Grande Valley in Mexico to document the life of a migrant farmworker family as part of a project at the Center for Documentary Studies. A recipient of several Lyndhurst Foundation grants, Whetstone has taught photography and writing workshops throughout the South, including residencies at the Appalachian Media Institute and at Appalshop Inc., a media arts center located in eastern Kentucky. While working at Appalshop, Whetstone served as project director for the exhibit Before the Flood, an oral history project documenting the history of the Watuaga River Valley, which premiered at the National Folk Festival. His photographs and writing have been featured in Southern Changes, DoubleTake, Southern Exposure, and elsewhere. After receiving his M.F.A. in photography from Yale in 2001, he was awarded the prestigious Sakier Prize for photography. Whetstone, a lecturer in the Art and Art History Department at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, exhibits his work at Wallspace Gallery and Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery in New York City. He co-teaches a Duke/UNC documentary photography class with Wendy Ewald.





Visiting Instructors


Brett Cook
Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
faceupproject@duke.edu

Brett Cook creates objects, experiences, and feelings that defy classification in any single discipline. His work has been shown at museums and galleries since 1991, concurrent with a practice manifested in public projects since 1984. The public works have been executed in the United States, from California to Maine, and internationally in Brazil, Barbados, and Mexico. His public collaborations include a South Central Los Angeles project addressing divinity; the Development/Gentrification Project installed in ten locations throughout Harlem; and a project addressing segregation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While some of his work has been commissioned by museums or public agencies, others have been self-initiated interventions on abandoned spaces. Cook has completed scores of these contemplative projects, often through an interactive and collaborative process. His use of participatory ethnographic strategies, progressive educational pedagogy, and community organizing connect his work to exceptionally wide audiences. He is a seasoned Ashtangi and student of many forms of yoga, meditation, and healing, which inform his process and products.

Cook’s work in museums and galleries can take a variety of forms, with a recurrent emphasis on painting, drawing, and photography. His museum work frequently includes elaborate installations that make intimately personal experiences universally accessible. His gallery installation work regularly includes documented participatory public projects, using a wide variety of media to retell the stories of transformation that occur through a process of social collaboration. Cook’s solo exhibitions include Revolution and Multifaceted at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York and Meditations at the Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University. Group exhibitions include Portraiture Now: Framing Memory at the Smithsonian Museum National Portrait Gallery; Social Studies/Brown V. Board of Ed. 40th Anniversary, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Community Interactions, Wayne State University Gallery, Detroit Michigan; and Hip-Hop Nation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California.

Cook’s teaching practice is an extension of his public collaborations and similarly involves diverse communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at Columbia and Stanford. Cook received a B.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and has had many residencies, including at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California.

Cook is currently the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor for Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for Spring 2008.

top




banner image:

Untitled, from the series Latino Pastimes—La Vida y el Fútbol. Photograph by William L. Plaxico, from the course "Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape," taught by Professor Tom Rankin.