Tuesday Talks: Ingrid Steffensen: This Is Your Brain at 135mph: Lessons in Learning from the Racetrack

What happens when an art history professor encounters the turbo-charged world of high-performance driving? While she learns a great deal about the techniques and non-negotiable limits of piloting a fast car around a closed circuit, she learns even more about herself. Exploring what motivates us to learn new things and push the boundaries of our own self-limitations is the subject of this talk, as well as her book Fast Girl: Don’t Brake until You See the Face of God and Other Good Advice from the Racetrack.

Ingrid Steffensen earned her PhD in art history from the University of Delaware. She has taught art and architectural history at Princeton, Rutgers, NJIT, and Bryn Mawr, and is the author of numerous articles and books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and architecture. Her memoir Fast Girl: Don’t Brake until You See the Face of God and Other Good Advice from the Racetrack (Seal Press, 2012) tells the tale of a college professor and New Jersey dance mom who discovered her inner speed demon at the racetrack. Steffensen is a certified high-performance driving instructor with the BMW Car Club of America and was a regular contributor to Speed Secrets Weekly, the now-retired e-newsletter of former professional racecar driver Ross Bentley. When she is not pounding on her computer at home in New York, she may be found hurtling around a racetrack with her crash helmet on and her stability control off.