Feb 28 & Mar 1: Rethinking philosophy through Project Vox

On February 28 and March 1, 2025, the symposium “Ten Years of Project Vox: Rethinking the People, Processes, and Publics of Philosophy” will bring together the people who researched, wrote, reviewed, and openly published information on marginalized philosophers on the Project Vox website (https://projectvox.org). As part of a global movement to reform philosophy instruction and reincorporate voices that had been excluded from the canon, Project Vox has been a collaborative effort to make this research accessible to a wide audience. The symposium is free, and all are welcome to attend.

Ten years ago this spring, Duke University Libraries and the Duke University Philosophy department launched a new website called Project Vox (https://projectvox.org). This site was an intervention into the teaching and study of early modern philosophy: it sought to re-integrate voices and ideas from the origins of philosophy as a discipline and, in the process, reform the study and teaching of philosophy.

At the time this initiative began, philosophy lagged far behind other humanities disciplines in numbers of female doctorates — even behind the sciences (as illustrated in this 2011 data visualization created by Kieran Healy, using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates). Despite the fact that some of philosophy’s earliest (female) practitioners, such as Emilie du Châtelet, were renowned for their insights into math and physics, the number of women pursuing a doctorate in philosophy was only 25% — not only lagging behind other humanities disciplines but also many fields of study in the sciences and social sciences. Researchers into this phenomenon (e.g., Dougherty et al, 2015; Paxton et al, 2012; Thompson et al, 2016) suggested this was due to women’s lack of representation in the field — both who was teaching the courses and whose writing and ideas were taught in the courses.

Because undergraduates and their instructors could not easily undertake the original research required to pull together the ideas, writings, and history of marginalized figures, Project Vox stepped into this gap. Its cross-disciplinary team of faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates, working with an international network of philosophy scholars, undertook that original research and writing then made this information freely available on the web for re-use (using a Creative Commons Attribution license, or CC-BY).

Ten years later, Project Vox has worked with over 100 student and scholar collaborators to create and publish accessible and in-depth entries on twelve philosophers. In the process, we have explored and practiced collaborative humanistic research and writing, recognizing individual and collective authorship, making our processes transparent and reproducible across a constantly changing team, and ensuring our work is sustainable. At Project Vox’s 10th anniversary symposium, we’ll reflect on what’s changed, what challenges remain, and what’s next.