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Helping humanities professionals tap the power of the region's expansive cultural heritage to enrich community life, inspire visitors, and revitalize the economy.
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about us MARCH Staff Howard Gillette, Director Tyler Hoffman, Associate Director Sharon Ann Holt, Director of Programs Mission Statement The Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University-Camden is organized around a series of demonstration projects that develop innovative humanities strategies and programs to improve the quality of life in the Mid-Atlantic. As a catalyst for collaboration and change, MARCH
MARCH Funded initially by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rutgers-Camden Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities has developed a multi-centered and highly collaborative approach that brings new vitality to humanities research, programming, training, and communication. Transcending jurisdictional as well as disciplinary boundaries, this effort aims to tap the region's rich intellectual and cultural resources to forge new strategies for understanding and communicating the nature of the places where we live and their inheritance. Responding to forces that tend to divide, we seek to make the whole of the Mid-Atlantic humanities community larger than just the sum of its parts and thus to contribute to civic revitalization. Our effort proceeds on three levels. First, we use our university base to offer on-site teaching and training opportunities. We consider such training an essential element in preparing and encouraging the next generation of scholars, cultural administrators, archivists, and teachers to enter public humanities work. In addition to identifying new resources for preparing graduate students to enter public humanities fields, we offer workshops, institutes, and video exchanges to prepare a range of constituents, from high school and university teachers to life-long learners, including tourists, to take better advantage of existing cultural resources in the learning process. Second, we seek to link humanists throughout the Mid-Atlantic through a Powerful Internet presence that provides both a repository of information about the region and a running commentary on how it is being interpreted and understood. In addition to offering news of regional conferences and events, the site includes a fully searchable database of cultural practice in the region. Cultural institutions of all kinds are invited to participate, along with individual consultants, independent scholars, and teaching faculty at all levels of practice. Easily entered and updated, this collective cultural resource serves as a repository of best practice throughout the region. Finally, we offer structured face-to-face assessment processes to help develop new models for advanced work in public humanities. These assessments (or case studies) are targeted to different parts of the region, advancing local practice and establishing lessons for review and evaluation throughout the whole Mid-Atlantic. Through our development of demonstration projects, we are committed to developing new collaborative relationships to advance best practice throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. |
