Periclean Practitioners are serving as thought partners providing tactical assistance to the Jessie Ball duPont Fund’s “Place” cohort of campus grantees: Temple University, University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, University of the South (Sewanee), and Hampden-Sydney College.
The five “Place” campuses are working to make hands-on, community-connected education about local government, society, and public issues a permanent part of their curriculum, community partnerships, and the student experience. Colleagues from William and Mary’s Strategic Cultural Partnerships will capture cohort learnings and create practical resources and tools to help strengthen, inform, and accelerate the campuses’ work.
The five Periclean Practitioners bring experience with community-connected, place-based work to help campus teams work through the barriers to scaling it across their campuses.
Senior Advisor Eric Hartman is facilitating the cohort learning community.
The 2026-27 Periclean Practitioners and their matches are:
Ben Berger is Professor of Political Science and Executive Director of the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility at Swarthmore College. He has built and strengthened extensive long-term relationships with community members and community organizations in Chester, PA. As part of those efforts, Ben piloted and developed the Chester Semester, a full-credit Swarthmore course whose curriculum is co-created with longtime Chester residents. Those residents – the Chester-Swarthmore Advisory Fellows – are remunerated for sharing their knowledge and insights. Chester Semester won an award from Campus Compact in 2024.
Lori Daggar is Department Chair and Associate Professor of History at Ursinus College, where she leads an archival/oral history project that records Lenape Elder and American Indian Movement activist John Thomas’s experiences, co-organizes an annual Lenape Symposium, and coordinates the new Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) minor. In addition, she is leading a new, Mellon-funded effort to build a campus Center for Humanities in Action.
Danielle Lake is Director of Design Thinking and Associate Professor of Human Service Studies at Elon University. She is a cofounder of the Power+Place Collaborative, a set of partnerships among Elon University, local cultural organizations, libraries, and public agencies. Through oral-history projects, community storytelling, history harvests, digital archives, documentary films, and public events, Power+Place works with residents to preserve and share the histories of the places they call home. This work has required navigating the complexities of representing history honestly, inclusively, and collaboratively and of translating that history into opportunities for civic learning and change.
Raymond Patton is Associate Professor of History and Director, Honors Program and Macaulay Honors at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. As Faculty Director there, he has overseen a place-based curriculum teaching arts, history, science, and civic leadership in New York City through experiential learning. Each semester, he guides faculty in incorporating New York City based experiential learning into their courses. This has included revising John Jay College’s honors program curriculum around action research.
Alexandra Prince is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. Through the Tree of Peace Project, collaboration with Mohawk community elders, and archival work with the Haudenosaunee community, Alexandra has been a bridger and advocate for connecting the physical landscape with Haudenosaunee history, knowledge, and contemporary relationships, creating living spaces for gathering, teaching, reflection, and relationship-building.
Eric Hartman is serving as Senior Advisor for Civic Education and Community Partnerships at Project Pericles. His community partnership and civic engagement efforts have led to a book, nearly 100 academic and popular articles, and consultancies with a range of universities. His faculty and administrative roles have spanned American politics, education, global studies, history, human rights, international development, leadership studies, and public administration at a diverse array of institutions, from the Community College of Allegheny County to Providence College, Kansas State University, Haverford College, and the University of Pennsylvania.
We are grateful for this opportunity to extend our Periclean Practitioners’ expertise beyond their home institutions, and we look forward to sharing what we learn with the consortium and the wider field.
Making hands-on, community-connected education about local government, society, and public issues a permanent part of a school’s curriculum, community partnerships and the student experience.
Making Philadelphia-based civic learning foundational within the General Education curriculum, including embedding community-informed activities with Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Monument Lab.
Strengthening permanent community engagement through a Community Oversight Board made up of South Bend leaders from civic, nonprofit, and educational sectors. This Board will help shape Notre Dame’s community scholarship, strengthen faculty practice, and create a model for community-informed research and partnership.
Bringing more than a decade of institutional research and reconciliation into Georgetown’s undergraduate core curriculum through place-based learning. Faculty development and new curricular resources will help students engage Georgetown’s history, think critically across disciplines, and navigate complex issues and differing perspectives.
Infusing place-based learning and an understanding of Sewanee’s history into the first-year experience. This planning work will identify pathways for incoming students to understand the university’s historical legacy and its relationship with the local St. Mark’s community through Sewanee’s Roberson Project and Heritage Trail.
Building institutional infrastructure for place-based learning by integrating Southside Virginia’s history, from the colonial and Revolutionary eras through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Civil Rights Movement, through a campus research laboratory, faculty curriculum development, student research, and partnerships with regional historic sites that connect students to the people, places, and histories that have shaped the region.
The duPont Fund has engaged William and Mary’s Strategic Cultural Partnerships to work closely with cohort facilitators and individual grantee organizations to capture learnings and create practical resources and tools that help strengthen, inform, and accelerate their work. This effort aims to connect25 individual projects as a unified national community that learns from each other’s experiences and can share that learning with organizations beyond those funded in this initial cohort .
