This professorship seeks to fund proposals that allow UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University to work together to extend their capacity in specific areas.

Keohane Professorship Banner

The Keohane Professorship brings prominent faculty to serve as visiting professors at UNC and Duke for a one-year period, during which they deliver a lecture series and engage students and faculty around areas of shared interest to both institutions. Ultimately, the program is designed to energize new scholarly connections between Duke and UNC.

This professorship recognizes the remarkable contributions of Nannerl Keohane during her term as president of Duke University, and the unprecedented level of collaboration she and former UNC Chancellor James Moeser facilitated between these two great institutions.

The award was created in 2004 by then-Chancellor Moeser and was funded by the late Julian and Josie Robertson (parents of Spencer Robertson, Duke ’98, and Alex Robertson, UNC ’01) and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust.

Goals of the Professorship

  1. Promote inter-institutional collaboration and the enhancement of intellectual life at both universities by strengthening established or encouraging new collaborations.
  2. Contribute to the intellectual life of both campuses and enrich curricular experiences through a carefully planned series of engagements with students.
  3. Deliver a series of three original public lectures that delve into the most promising directions of research in the scholar’s field, with attention to a broad audience.

Structure and Activities of the Professorship

Keohane professors will work closely with faculty leadership on both campuses to identify dates for three visits to the Triangle, each anchored by one of the public lectures, across a one-year period. These visits will include sessions with undergraduate and graduate students, visits to relevant classes, and other types of engagement with intellectual communities on both campuses. Recipients will also work with either Duke University Press or UNC Press to explore publishing revised versions of the lectures.

Funding

Keohane professors receive a payment of $50,000, from which they are responsible for covering travel expenses for their three visits.

Selection Process

Every year, the offices of the Duke and UNC provosts meet with relevant deans to discuss areas of important intellectual ferment where a visiting professorship would deepen intellectual ties between the two campuses. The offices then invite faculty leaders in a selected area to put forward potential invitees who can speak to the most exciting avenues of research in that scholarly domain, and do so in a way that engages broader audiences. The provosts from both institutions jointly make the final selection. The humanities, arts and interpretive social sciences are current areas of particular focus.

Ashon Crawley

University of Virginia

Visiting Scholar to Explore Severance, Recovery, and Place  During Keohane Professorship at Duke and UNC

Ashon Crawley is Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination; and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), an epistolary exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love.

He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument” (WW Norton), about the impact of the AIDS crisis for black social life. Entering the conversation by considering musicians, singers and choir directors that labored for black churches, “Made Instrument” explores the ways gender, sex, sexuality remain unthought and untheorized but are no less real practices of the living and the dead.

A multidisciplinary artist working in the visual and the sonic, Crawley is a Yaddo interdisciplinary arts fellow, a MacDowell interdisciplinary arts fellow, and a New City Arts Initiative Fellow, a LIT (Learning It Together) Artist Fellow and his work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington DC, at Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery both in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum both in Los Angeles, California.

All his writing and his approach to art practices is about what he calls otherwise possibility.


Professor Ashon Crawley will visit Carolina and Duke campuses three times this academic year, to give community lectures, academic seminars, visit classrooms, and meet with undergraduates, grad students and faculty at both campuses.

All community lectures will begin at 5:30 p.m. and are free and open to the public. A light reception will follow these lectures.

Spring schedule:

October 23, 2024 at Duke Campus: Nasher Museum Auditorium at 5:30 p.m.

January 29, 2025 at Chapel Hill Campus: Moeser Auditorium at 6 p.m. (Lecture Title – “Air and Spirit”)

April 1-4, 2025: TBA

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