Faculty members explore timefulness at the 2025 Humanistic Inquiry Symposium
“Pieces” (Summer Set), 2024, color woodblock on paper, 33.75” x 23”, by Ruben Castillo
All are invited to this year’s Humanistic Inquiry Symposium, an annual Skidmore tradition intended to celebrate humanistic inquiry and the liberal arts, on Friday, March 21, and Saturday, March 22, at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.
The 2025 Humanistic Inquiry Symposium will explore the theme of Time — its purposes, its influence, and the ways it shapes our existence –– inviting audience members to reflect on how various disciplines illuminate timefulness, our state of being in time.
First held by Skidmore College in 2018, the Humanistic Inquiry Symposium aims to support humanistic inquiry at Skidmore and underscore Skidmore’s historic strength in the humanities. The tradition expresses an ongoing commitment to the work of humanists as a vital, vibrant force within Skidmore’s institutional culture, with a goal to make public the process and the fruits of humanistic inquiry. Past themes have included Mistakes and Discovery, Generations, Wonder, and Metamorphosis.
This year’s events will feature a keynote address by Thomas DeFrantz, professor at Northwestern University and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology. He will be joined by President Marc C. Conner and 18 faculty members from a variety of disciplines who will lead sessions examining timefulness.
Kicking off at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, March 21, with DeFrantz’s address, the symposium will include seven sessions, each led by two to four speakers with academic backgrounds in dance, mathematics and statistics, theater, religious studies, and sociology, among other disciplines. Closing remarks will be held at 6 p.m. the following day, March 22.
All events are free and open to the public. For a full schedule, visit the Humanistic Inquiry website.
About Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thomas F. DeFrantz, professor at Northwestern University, directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a humanities and creative research lab. DeFrantz is founding director of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, holding a passionate belief in our shared capacity to engage creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
Thomas F. DeFrantz, photo by Christopher Duggan
DeFrantz convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and is a faculty member at Northwestern University, with past teaching positions at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, Duke, the University of Nice, and more. He also contributed concept and a voiceover for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture in 2016.
