Jeff Prudhomme, Ph.D., is a Vice President and Fellow of the Interactivity Foundation. He joined the Foundation in 2002 and became a Vice President in 2009. His core activities include: participating in the overall guidance of the Foundation’s operations, supervising the Fellows’ project activities, planning and participating in outreach and partnership activities with other organizations, conducting training for educational uses of the Foundation’s discussion process, and facilitating his own discussion projects.
With an academic background in philosophy and religious studies, Prudhomme has long been interested in taking philosophical thinking out of the classroom and out into the world. He has facilitated sustained citizen discussion projects on such diverse topics as human genetic technology, the future of civic discourse, the design and development of our towns and cities, the future of the family, and the future of sports and society. He maintains a wide range of public policy interests, believing that citizens in a democracy have a responsibility to think broadly about emerging public matters.
Since 2006 Prudhomme has played a formative role in efforts to introduce the Foundation’s exploratory discussion process into higher education classrooms. This includes training faculty and supporting the development of courses that integrate student-facilitated discussion teams as a core component of the discovery and development of course content. Prudhomme taught philosophy and religious studies at Wesleyan College (Georgia), where he received the Quillian Award for excellence in teaching. Prior to joining the Interactivity Foundation he served as the Director of Frostburg State University’s Institute for Service-Learning, an Institute dedicated to situating student learning within an expansive and active sense of citizenship. As a Post-Doctoral Fellow for Critical Thinking at James Madison University he taught philosophy and participated in the revision of the University’s general education program. He also taught a graduate seminar at the University of Virginia and taught for two years in a public school.
Prudhomme’s thinking has long pursued interdisciplinary intersections and the crossing of disciplinary boundary lines, especially as this enables the development of divergent approaches to complex topics. His interests lie in exploring the ways our basic concepts and presuppositions shape the ways we think and the ways we experience the world. His doctoral studies focused on the interconnections of philosophical and religious reflection in western thought. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Religious Studies program of the University of Virginia. He completed other graduate studies during two years spent at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany, under the auspices of a Fulbright scholarship. He graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from The University of the South. Prudhomme’s publications include a book exploring the theological significance of Martin Heidegger’s reflections on being, shorter articles and translations, as well as discussion guides and supporting materials for the Interactivity Foundation.
