The Next Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University

Ranjana Khanna, a noted feminist scholar, will be the next director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. She will take on this new role in January.

The institute, founded in 1999, has a stated mission “to encourage and enable serious humanistic inquiry, and to promote a heightened awareness of the centrality of the humanities to the quality of human life, social interaction, and scholarship in all fields.”

Dr. Khanna is a professor of English, literature, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. She joined the university’s faculty in 2000 after teaching at the University of Washington and the University of Utah. Professor Khanna is the author of Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003).

Professor Khanna holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the University of York in England.