ACLS President Joy Connolly 2022 Speaking Engagements
ACLS President Joy Connolly is a celebrated scholar of ancient Roman rhetoric and political thought and their enduring influence in modernity, as well as a thought leader on the future of the humanities and fostering greater a more just and diverse academy.
She speaks and writes regularly on these topics and will be featured at the following public events in 2022:
Thursday, March 26
CAVI Distinguished Women Scholars Lecture: “Exchange: A New Definition of ‘Classical’ Literature”
University of Victoria
Virtual Event
This lecture considers the significance of exchange in Greek and Roman literature on several levels, including Socratic dialogue, oratorical training, and the relationship of Roman writers to Greek ones – leading to a new conception of “classical literature” and “classical studies” for the twenty-first century.
Monday, April 4
Rutledge Memorial Lecture in Classics: “Imagining Communities In and With ‘The Classical World’”
University of Tennessee
John C Hodges Library, Lindsay Young Auditorium
1015 Volunteer Blvd, Knoxville TN
Scholarship requires particular knowledge and skills — and something else: a community. Working with examples of first century BCE Romans and Greeks in Rome studying earlier Greek writers, Connolly describes the communities they created, the terms they devised, and the political implications of both. Then, turning to the communities that modern scholars and students of the “classical world” compose, and considering the changing political context of those communities, I lay out some propositions for the future.
April 14-21
Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World
University of Pennsylvania
Penn Museum
3260 South St, Philadelphia, PA
Thursday, April 14 | “Public Matters: Prompts for the Study of Ancient Cultures”
This lecture examines several moments in the ancient and early modern scholarship of antiquity when scholars framed their research questions in response to current sociopolitical needs and aspirations.
Tuesday, April 19 | “The Skills of World-Making”
This lecture considers the development of expert skills required to invest in rebuilding the deep past — philology, dialogue and dialectic, understanding through migration, the preservation and interpretation of evidence, the creative imagination of past lives — as a humanistic ethic of care.
Thursday, April 21 | “Collaborator, Translator, Constructor: Co-creating Antiquities”
Here Connolly lays out several ways the study of antiquities may still be understood as mattering for the public today, focusing on the process of scholarship and specifically the acts laid out in the title and tackling some of the most pressing challenges to the construction of “classics” now.