Goucher French Professor Mark Ingram is currently attending the 2016 duPont Summer Seminars for the next three weeks.
The duPont Summer Seminars are an opportunity for faculty to immerse themselves in one of two topics, meeting with professors from other disciplines to learn, discuss, and explore together. Goucher is one of only 42 academic institutions whose faculty is eligible to apply for the Summer Seminars each year. The late Jessie Ball duPont created the fund, stipulating that it only benefit institutions that had received her donations from 1960 to 1964, Goucher College among them.
Ingram, whose classes span French, anthropology, and theatre, is attending “The Spatial Humanities” seminar. “The spatial humanities is a new interdisciplinary field that draws on technology to enrich the humanities with quantitative methods,” he said. Ingram’s research is focused on site-based urban performances. “Increasingly, space is a fundamental issue. We do Skype interviews in my classes, for French and anthropology. We’re collapsing space, but not really, because everyone’s speaking from a particular space or city. And these new technologies can help us to understand better the dimension of place as an important factor in people’s lives.” Ingram also co-teaches a French theater intensive abroad. “It’s an exciting way of doing interdisciplinary work,” he said.
The Seminars take place at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where participants spend four days a week going to three-hour sessions. The rest of the time is devoted to reading and working together. The duPont Summer Seminars encourage faculty to come to the residential retreat “with a spirit of openness and flexibility,” a spirit well-embodied by Ingram.