Read along with Duke faculty

Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college football players, anthropologist Tracie Canada reveals the ways young athletes strategically resist the exploitative systems that structure their everyday lives.

Biography

Dr. Tracie Canada is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, affiliated with Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and African & African American Studies. She is also the founder and director of the HEARTS (Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports) Lab. When Canada was a Duke undergraduate, she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a campus tour guide, and an intern in the Office of Football Relations. The latter is what inspired her current research. With a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Virginia, Canada returned to Duke in 2022. As a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer, she researches and teaches about race, sport, kinship, and the contemporary United States. Canada is the author of 'Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football' (University of California Press, 2025). In addition to her academic writing, her work has been featured in public outlets like Essence, TIME, The Guardian, and Scientific American.
 

5 questions to consider while reading

1. Can you apply some of the themes Canada discusses to the ways your favorite athletes are written about and portrayed in the media?

2. Does the everyday of a college football player that Canada describes align to what you thought it was?

3. How might the data that Canada presents be affected by more recent changes to the college sport landscape (including NIL, transfer portal, lawsuits for revenue sharing, etc.)?

4. Canada wrote about the college football system, but what are other situations where ‘corporeal concern’ and ‘kindred care’ are helpful terms to think with and through?

5. What is different about Canada’s ethnographic treatment of American football and the lives of its Black players? For example, how does this differ from historical, popular media, and biographical accounts of the sport?

It’s 1988 and Shelley Cooper is in trouble. He’s broke, he’s been fired from his construction job, and his ex-wife has left him for their next door neighbor and a new life in Kansas City. The only opportunity on his horizon is fifty pounds of his brother’s high-grade marijuana, which needs to be driven from Colorado to Houston and exchanged for a lockbox full of cash. The delivery goes off without a hitch, but getting home with the money proves to be a different challenge altogether. Fueled by a grab bag of resentments and self punishment, Shelley becomes a case study in the question of whether it’s possible to live without accepting yourself, and the dope money is the key to a lock he might never find. 

Biography

JP Gritton’s novel Wyoming, a Kirkus best debut of 2019, is out with Tin House. His awards include a Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellowship, the Meringoff prize in fiction, and the Donald Barthelme prize in fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. His essays have appeared in Missouri Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the department of English at Duke University. His translations of the work of Brazilian writer Cidinha da Silva have appeared in Asymptote, InTranslation, and Literary Matters.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. Shelley Cooper is often frustrating, self-destructive, and unreliable — but also deeply human. At what points did you sympathize with him, and at what points did you pull away from him? Did your feelings toward him change over the course of the novel?

2. How does violence function in the novel — as survival, self-expression, punishment, spectacle, or something else?

3. Did the novel challenge any assumptions you had about rural America, class, or the American West?

4. Much of the tension in the novel comes from the gap between how Shelley sees himself and how other people likely see him. How reliable do you think Shelley is as a narrator? Were there moments where you felt the novel was asking readers to read “against” his version of events?

5. Which relationship in the book felt most emotionally central to you, the reader? Which relationship felt most emotionally central to Shelley?

Chris Holaday offers readers the first book-length history of baseball’s integration in the Carolinas, showing its slow and unsteady progress, narrating the experience of players in a range of distinct communities, detailing the influence of baseball executives at the local and major league levels, and revealing that the changing structure of the professional baseball system allowed the major leagues to control integration at the state level. 

Biography

James "Chris" Holaday is an instructor in Duke's Thompson Writing Program. He is the author of several books on baseball history and various other topics he finds interesting (such as restaurant history). Chris even co-authored the cookbook "Southern Breads." His recent book "Cracks in the Outfield Wall, The History of Baseball Integration in the Carolinas," was published by UNC Press in 2025. A native of Texas, Chris is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill and has an M.A. in U.S. History from North Carolina Central University.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. What is the symbolism of the book's title?

2. Recurring themes of the book are loneliness and isolation. How were experiences different depending upon whether players were from southern U.S., the western U.S. or Cuba?

3. Why do you think Black Cubans were often viewed differently than Black players from the United States?

4. How important to the overall Civil Rights movement do you think the integration of baseball was?

5. What was the most interesting, or perhaps surprising, thing you learned in this book? 

Sönke Johnsen vividly describes how life in the water column of the open sea contends with a host of environmental challenges, such as gravity, movement, the absence of light, pressure that could crush a truck, catching food while not becoming food, finding a mate, raising young, and forming communities. He interweaves stories about the joys and hardships of the scientists who explore this beautiful and mysterious realm, which is under threat from human activity and rapidly changing before our eyes.

Biography

Originally trained in math, art, and dance, Sönke Johnsen has studied marine biology for the last 36 years, the last 24 of which have been at Duke University. He is particularly interested in vision, animal signals, and camouflage in the open ocean, but has also worked close to the coast and on land, where studies animal navigation, vision at night, and human cataracts. Public outreach is a strong focus, and Johnsen’s research has been featured in many traditional media outlets, but also in Finding Nemo, The Magic Treehouse book series, the poetry of John Updike, the humor of Dave Barry, and most recently in Ed Yong’s An Immense World. He has also written five books, The Optics of Life, Visual Ecology, Color in Nature, Into the Great Wide Ocean, and The Radiant Sea, and is currently working on the sixth, called The Language of Light. In his spare time, he is an avid nature photographer and amateur farmer.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. Life in the open ocean is extremely difficult to study because the sea is both vast and hard to access. This means we are left with more questions than answers about the animals that live there. What questions about these animals would you most like to know the answers to?

2. It is hard, slow, and expensive to get a large research ship out into “blue water”. Can you think of ways that we could study the ocean that would make it cheaper and more accessible to all?

3. Bioluminescence is so common in the open ocean and yet we know so little about what it does. Can you think of ways that we could study this phenomenon so that we could truly understand what it is being used for out there?

4. One of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the open sea is how animals within it can find each other to mate. Can you think of ways in which rare and small animals can find potential mates in this enormous and ever-moving habitat?

5. The book claims that one of the most powerful effects of working together at sea is the strong sense of community it builds. In what times in your life have you felt that you were part of a close community and what made you feel like that?

In this timely book, Rachel Myrick argues that polarization reshapes the nature of constraints on democratic leaders, which in turn erodes the advantages democracies have in foreign affairs. Myrick’s account links the effects of polarization on democratic governance to theories of international relations, integrating work across the fields of international relations, comparative politics, and American politics to explore how patterns of domestic polarization shape the international system.

Biography

Rachel Myrick is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University. Her research explores how polarization affects foreign policymaking in democracies, with an emphasis on US national security policy. Her first book, Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability, was published in 2025 with Princeton University Press in their Studies in International History & Politics Series. At Duke, Myrick is a faculty affiliate of the Program in American Grand Strategy, the America in the World Consortium program, and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies. Myrick completed her PhD in 2021 at the Department of Political Science at Stanford University.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. How, if at all, does polarization pose a threat to national security?

2. Do you think the United States is an outlier in terms of its polarized politics, or are other democracies experiencing similar trends?

3. What lessons can we learn from other polarized democracies, both historically and presently?

4. What strategies do you see as most promising for reducing polarization or at least mitigating its negative effects on foreign policy?

5. Where are the key opportunities for bipartisan cooperation in foreign affairs?

Adaptable takes us on a tour of the human body. In each chapter, we learn how our bodies navigate an uncertain world: how we grow and mature; how our brains develop and learn; how our hearts, lungs, and digestive systems deliver oxygen and nutrients; how we manage toxins, temperature, and water balance; how we move and reproduce; how our immune system keeps invaders at bay; and how we age and decline. Crucially, we come to see how understanding our bodies helps us make sense of the big issues we face today.

Biography

Dr. Herman Pontzer, Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University, investigates our species' evolved physiology, with a focus on energy metabolism. His projects have ranged widely, from studies of ultramarathoners in the U.S., to fieldwork with the hunter-gatherer and pastoralist communities in east Africa, to fossil excavation in the Republic of Georgia and observing chimpanzees in Uganda. His studies of metabolism have changed our understanding of diet and exercise in health and obesity, as well as the metabolic changes we experience as we grow up and grow old. Pontzer's work has reached millions through his writing and appearances on popular podcasts including StarTalk and Armchair Expert. His newest book, Adaptable (2025), is a finalist for the 2026 PEN America / Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. When did your life begin? How did the events leading up to that moment affect the person you are today?

2. How have changes in daily life over the past century affected our health? How about the past 10,000 years?

3. If Race is a cultural construct rather than a meaningful biological category, why do rates of heart disease and other health outcomes differ among Race groups in the U.S. today?

4. How does your DNA affect your chances of winning an Olympic medal?

5. With life expectancy increasing in many parts of the world, do you think average human life expectancy might every reach 150 years? If so, how far into the future is that reality?

Food-policy experts Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg remind us, modern technology has made food more affordable, abundant, varied, and tastier than at any other time in history. In Feed the People!, they argue that modern food pleasures like Waffle House waffles, and the industrial systems that make them possible, are actually good. With smart technology and commonsense policies, we can make them even better. They show that building a food system that works for everyone will take more than just eating your vegetables.

Biography

Gabriel N. Rosenberg is an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies and history at Duke University. He is a historian of the modern United States who focuses on braided environmental, economic, technological, political, and cultural histories of food and agriculture. His research won the Gilbert C. Fite Award from the Agricultural History Society, the K. Austin Kerr Prize from the Business History Conference, and a François André Michaux Fund Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society. He was also a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University's Program in Agrarian Studies, an Early Career Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's Humanities Center, and a Duke Endowment Fellow of the National Humanities Center. He also writes about food policy and politics for such outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Vox.com and many others.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. What is industrial food, and what are common misconceptions about it?

2. Do I need to eat local and organic to be a healthy and ethical consumer?

3. Should I be worried about how high-tech agriculture and food production seem to have gotten?

4. Should I be concerned about eating processed and ultra-processed foods?

5. A central concept of the book is democratic hedonism. What do hedonism and pleasure have to do with food policy and building a better food system?

Across the United States, groups of grassroots volunteers gather in overgrown, systemically neglected cemeteries. As they rake, clean headstones, and research silenced histories, they offer care to individuals who were denied basic rights and forms of belonging in life and in death. Cemetery Citizens is the first book-length study of this emerging form of social justice work. It focuses on how racial disparities shape the fates of the dead, and asks what kinds of repair are still possible. Drawing on interviews, activist anthropology, poems, and drawings, Adam Rosenblatt takes us to gravesite reclamation efforts in three prominent American cities.

Biography

Adam Rosenblatt is an ethnographer, cartoonist, human rights activist and community-engaged educator. He is the author of Digging for the Disappeared: Forensic Science After Atrocity (Stanford, 2015) and Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds (Stanford, 2024). Adam has been consulted by the United Nations and other policymakers on questions related to missing persons and mass graves, served on the board of the Friends of Geer Cemetery, and co-founded the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory, a network of scholars and activists funded by the Duke Endowment. A graduate of the year-long certificate program at the Sequential Artists Workshop, Adam has been the graphic ethnographer for a team of anthropologists working in northern Uganda and made various contributions to comics anthologies and advocacy zines. He is currently at work on his first graphic novel.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. What purposes do you think a cemetery is intended to serve, and for whom? Have you spent time in cemeteries? What purposes have cemeteries served for you?

2. Cemetery Citizens argues that cemeteries are important parts of the “landscapes of memory and forgetting” in our cities and towns: places where some lives are made visible and celebrated while others are erased or marginalized. What other kinds of places make up the landscapes of memory and forgetting where you live? How do economic and social inequities impact those places and the stories they tell?

3. The idea of “revision” is very important in Cemetery Citizens. Revision, whether in our own lives or the collective transformation of an overgrown cemetery, can preserve what Jill Stauffer calls “the hope of opening up a future not fully determined by past harms.” It is messy, iterative, full of improvisation and creativity. What are some other places where you see revision of this kind happening, whether personal or collective?

4. Cemeteries and other heritage sights–especially ones of significance to Native American and African American communities–have generated new, more capacious ideas of what it means to be part of a “descendant community.” Members of descendant communities might share cultural ideas about their connection to the dead and the proper ways of honoring them, or similar stories of displacement, oppression, and resistance, without having direct blood ties. But organizing descendant communities, and understanding whose voices truly represent these diffuse communities, turns out to be very challenging. What descendant communities, if any, do you consider yourself part of? Where and how does that descendant community make its voice heard?

5. Cemetery Citizens uses some techniques not usually found in scholarly monographs, including “found poetry” (poems generated directly from interview transcripts) and sketches. These techniques are intended to have readers pay a different, slower kind of attention to the words of people who reclaim cemeteries and the lively ways their bodies move as they do this work. What was it like to read an academic book that featured these nontraditional forms of writing and observation? What other formats or media do you think could be used in scholarly research?

In Moral AI, world-renowned researchers in moral psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence tackle these thorny issues head-on. Writing lucidly and calmly, they lay out the recent advances in this still nascent field, peeling away the exaggeration and misleading arguments. Instead, they offer clear examinations of the moral concerns at the heart of AI programs, from racial equity to personal privacy, fake news to autonomous weaponry. This is an essential primer for any thinking person.

Biography

Dr. Jana Schaich Borg is an Associate Research Professor at the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University and co-director of the Moral Attitudes and Decision-Making Lab and the Moral Artificial Intelligence Lab. A neuroscientist working at the intersection of brain science, psychology, data science, and artificial intelligence, her research examines how humans make complex moral and value-based decisions, and how insights from brain science can guide the development of AI systems that people should and will trust. As part of that work, she designs approaches for humans and AI to collaborate effectively to learn from one another in morally complex, high-stakes settings. She also works with computer scientists and philosophers to develop technical methods for building trustworthy AI systems aligned with human values and moral reasoning.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and attended the Hotchkiss School, Amherst College, and Yale University. He taught at Dartmouth College 1981-2009 and since then at Duke University, where he is Chauncey Stillman Distinguished Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University with secondary appointments in the Law School and the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He has published 8 books, 21 edited collections, and over 250 articles and chapters on a wide variety of issues. His current focus is on moral artificial intelligence, political polarization, and moral psychology and brain science. He co-directs Summer Seminars in Neuroscience and Philosophy, which trains philosophers in neuroscience and neuroscientists in philosophy; and he co-teaches a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, on the Coursera platform with over a million students registered.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. Is AI a threat to our basic values and current way of life?

2. What do you think are some of the most important Moral AI issues for the Duke community to address?

3. How can the Duke Community play a unique role in ensuring AI gets deployed to help people, and behaves consistently with human values in the process?

4. How can we design AI systems to align with human morality?

5. How can we make AI companies less likely to act immorally?

Fascinating photons make up light, from X-rays and microwaves to the colors of the rainbow. Scientists use tiny photons to study and create things big and small, like using a precise laser in an experiment or learning about the origins of the universe itself. Complex concepts are presented in a fun and readable style as physicist Dr. Eve Vavagiakis shines a light on these unique elementary particles and the many ways they appear and behave. Readers are invited to imagine harnessing the power of photons, perhaps by observing distant stars through a telescope or building a quantum computer! 

Biography

Dr. Eve M. Vavagiakis is an experimental cosmologist and an Assistant Professor of Physics at Duke University. She works on high-elevation telescopes in the Chilean Atacama Desert as a member of the CCAT Observatory, Simons Observatory, and Atacama Cosmology Telescope Collaborations. She was previously a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University. Eve works on instrumentation, building cameras for these telescopes. She also analyzes pictures of the cosmic microwave background: the oldest light in the universe. Eve is a passionate science communicator and the author of the Meet the Universe series of children’s books.

5 questions to consider while reading

1. In this book, photons travel through space, carry information, and help scientists solve problems. If you could use light to invent or discover something new, what would you want to do?

2. Scientists who study light work in many different places, from telescopes and laboratories, to hospitals and universities. Which kind of scientist would you most want to be, and why?

3. Our eyes are natural photon detectors, constantly collecting light from the world around us. If you pause and look carefully, what photons are reaching your eyes right now, and what are they helping you learn about the world?

4. Photons can come from stars, lasers, screens, fireflies, and even your own body. What are some of the most interesting or beautiful kinds of light you notice in your everyday life?

5. Learning about photons reminds us that even tiny things can have a huge impact. What is something small that can make a big difference in the world or in someone’s life?