Dr. Marchant earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Justice with a concentration in Theatre from The American University in Washington, D.C. He received his Juris Doctor degree from the James E. Beasley School of Law at Temple University. He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Art Education focusing in Cultural Policy and Arts Administration with a minor in Theatre & Performance Studies from The Ohio State University where he researched how theatres can successfully produce controversial and provocative work.

Dr. James Charles Marchant is the Director of the Arts Administration graduate program in the School of the Arts at the University of New Orleans. He has taught and run arts administration programs at Southern Utah University, Elon University, and the Savannah College of Art & Design. He is an attorney and arts administrator and has a background in nonprofit administration in both the arts and social service sectors. He will be teaching various classes within the Arts Administration program as well as supervising internships, directing the graduate program, and continuing to build relations with professional arts organizations.

Dr. Marchant has volunteered with and/or served on the board of directors for various arts organizations including choral groups, dance companies, film festivals, music festivals, opera companies, and theatre companies. During his time at The Ohio State University, he expanded his experience to cover the visual arts in museums, galleries, and studios. Although Dr. Marchant has been involved in the arts throughout his lifetime, prior to shifting to Arts Administration for a career, he worked as an attorney in the areas of employment law and general litigation as well as social service legal work. While in law school, he was involved with groups supporting asylum claims to the United States and worked in the area of death penalty defense. Prior to law school, he worked in the area of nonprofit administration for organizations involved in social service work including legal work for people who were homeless, people with disabilities, and people with HIV and AIDS.

Teaching Philosophy

Education is not only about preparing students to find their place, but also to be better and more thoughtful people in the world. In the play The History Boys by Alan Bennett, one of the students complains he does not understand poetry and that it is about stuff that has not happened to him yet. The teacher responds that he also does not always understand poetry, but things will happen in his life and he will find the answers in that same poetry he couldn’t quite understand when he first learned about it.

I have had a lifelong love for education and the arts since I was a small child. I believe my best teachers not only taught me facts, but gave me a thirst for knowledge and taught me how to ask questions. Asking questions allows students to find the answers for themselves. While in graduate school, my professors let me adapt the assignments in class to suit my interests and needs and I saw this as an important part of my own learning process that I also utilize in the classroom. This does not mean that lessons are not structured, but that lessons can adapt to the needs and learning styles of the students. Students do not necessarily need exact answers, but the skills to find those answers.

Teaching does not stop at the classroom door, but involves all aspects of our lives, from application to a program, to mentoring students during their time in college, and afterwards when they have moved on to other endeavors. I think the greatest compliment I have received from my students is not when they tell me they have changed their minds about a subject I have addressed in the classroom, but that they had never looked at the topic in quite that way before. My goal in teaching is to open students up to the possibility of seeing things in a different way.

In research, Dr. Marchant is interested in issues surrounding controversial and provocative work, their place in social justice development throughout the world and the effect they have on the nonprofit organizations producing or presenting the work and the local community where they occur. He is also conducting research in how the arts are utilized to develop, strengthen and revitalize small communities where he has focused on the arts in Provincetown, Massachusetts and in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. He is a member of the Association of Arts Administration Educators and is a regular presenter at the annual international conferences on Social Theory, Politics & the Arts and The Arts in Society.  He also serves as a peer reviewer for the Journal of Arts Administration, Law & Society.