Until recently, a philosophy doctoral student looking for a dissertation subject would likely choose from an impressive but limited group of historical thinkers. Kant. Descartes. Voltaire. All men. All white.
A decade ago, a humanities project at Duke set out to elevate many of the lesser-known women of the field. Called Project Vox, it was a multidisciplinary attempt to discover and spotlight many female philosophers whose impact on the field was either buried over time or never properly recognized at all.
It worked.
For 10 years now, Project Vox has provided a platform for students across Duke - in philosophy but also economics, political science, history and the arts - to conduct and publish research on the Vox website, an open-access resource that has helped fueled a renaissance among philosophy scholars around the world. The site has recorded about 300,000 page views from 180,000 unique users in 190 countries. It has welcomed scholars from at least a half-dozen countries as collaborators; more than 100 students, faculty and staff members have been a part of it.
And in doing so, it has brought the work of female thinkers like Emilie Du Chatelet , Margaret Cavendish and Tullia d'Aragona to light.
"Ten years ago you couldn't write a dissertation on one of these figures and get an academic job," says Andrew Janiak, the Duke philosophy professor who co-directs the project. "You had to write about a canonical figure; that isn't true anymore. You can write about Emilie du Chatelet, for example, and get a job. That's a clear shift. We hear this from people. We see it in our own students but also hear it from colleagues in other countries. All the indications are that we're having an impact in this global shift in our discipline. I had no idea that would happen."
Janiak is part of the core team that created the project along with Liz Milewicz, Will Shaw and Cheryl Thomas from Duke Libraries. Vox will celebrate its 10th anniversary when it hosts a symposium beginning Friday, Feb. 28, that is expected to draw scholars from around the country and beyond.
The Creation of Project Vox
"Historians of philosophy owe a huge debt to the wonderful people involved in the creation, design and breadth of Project Vox," said Christia Mercer, a philosophy professor at Columbia University. "The site's visual finesse provoked our imaginations, as its historical seriousness created a secure grounding for innovative scholarship. By constructing such an informative and beautiful website, the Project Vox team laid the foundations for pioneering work in the history of philosophy."
From the start, Project Vox has been a student-focused, interdisciplinary project. It draws students from across campus to conduct research, go to professional meetings and write and publish their work on the Vox website. Among their key roles: assuring that the content on the website is easy for the masses to consume.
"One of the things young undergraduates can provide is a fresh look at what we're doing," Janiak said. "We don't want to be a scholarly resource that only scholars can read. So every year the undergraduates read through everything we do. They root out jargon and obscure language."
Vox began with some funding from the Mellon Foundation but now sits within Duke's Bass Connections umbrella, a program that funds interdisciplinary projects that involve Duke faculty, staff and students mixing disciplines and levels of expertise.
It has helped elevate two sorts of hidden figures - those women whose work was never well known as well as those who were influential at the time but largely erased over time from the historical record.
The Hidden Figures
Consider Germaine de Staël, a household name in very few households. De Staël was a writer and philosopher in the late 18th century whose political views and influential writings were such a threat to Napoleon following the French Revolution that he exiled her from Paris and had her books burned. Notably, she corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and urged him to oppose slavery in the American South.
Mary Purcell's research focuses on Margaret Cavendish , a 17th-century writer and philosopher who published more than a dozen works at a time when women just didn't do that sort of thing. Purcell was an undergraduate at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania when she first learned about Cavendish; through Project Vox, she realized Cavendish was a substantial figure worthy of study. Eventually, Purcell ended up here at Duke, where she is now a philosophy Ph.D. student still studying Cavendish and others like her.
"I am constantly grateful for the support and resources for women in philosophy and research on women philosophers at Duke," she said. "But I am aware that, still, most students in this country do not learn about the existence of women philosophers and their work. Most students do not attend places like Duke."
Vox's next frontier to conquer is a daunting one. Its leaders want to tackle inaccuracies about philosophers on Wikipedia, the popular open-source Internet resource that has become the first option for many doing research on prominent figures in history. A basic Google search of a person's name usually produces a table of basic information that often comes from Wikipedia. For many female philosophers, that info is incorrect or incomplete, Janiak said.
"That portrayal of an historically neglected figure is crucial, and often misleading at best," he said. And that misleading information or bias can have a lasting impact. So we're trying to help improve that."
