President Mary Pendergraft, the Board of Governors, and Executive Director Sherwin Little warmly invite you to Charleston, SC, to celebrate the American Classical League’s Diamond Jubilee Institute. Our host, the College of Charleston, welcomes us back after a two-year delay to celebrate our 75th ACL Institute in person and to explore all the ways of belonging in classics.
The Program Committee, including your friends and colleagues Christine Albright, Reina Callier, Caroline Kelly, Stephanie Krause, Krystal Kubichek, Alita Shenk, and Bryan Whitchurch, will finish vetting and inform those who submitted proposals by mid-February.
The theme for the 2020 Institute was “Slavery,” and our hosts had invited us to the heart of the old Confederacy to confront the issues of ancient and modern slavery head-on, and not even a pandemic could stop us from doing so. In the virtual Institutes of 2020 and 2021 members presented numerous challenging sessions engaging with both slavery and its lasting legacy. As we return to Charleston, where engagement with that legacy is part of daily life, we invite members to continue that engagement within ACL and through their offerings at the coming Institute.
This year we are building on the last two themes of “Slavery” and "Empire: A Fuller Accounting" with the special theme of “All Our Roots.” At their roots in antiquity and through their growth into modernity, classical culture and the field of classics have nurtured and been nurtured by people of diverse genders, ethnicities, religions, and philosophies. Although such contributions have often been unintentionally forgotten or maliciously suppressed, it is critical to our students’ sense of belonging to see themselves and people with whom they identify both prominent in antiquity and leading in the field of classics. For their benefit, we can scrape away layer by layer to uncover the inspiration American civil rights leaders found in classical authors, the scholarship of prominent Black classicists like Helen Maria Chesnutt or HBCUs like Howard University, the confident corrective of Senegalese President Leopold Senghor that classics was not the possession of colonizers, but an equal inheritance of Africans through Juba, Masinissa, and Augustine, the sixteenth-century anti-slavery writings of de Las Casas, the African and Near Eastern Emperors like the Severans or Philip, all the way down to characters like Memnon and Andromeda in our deepest and widest-branching mythological roots. With this Jubilee Institute, we can help everyone celebrate their own claim to classics.
We welcome proposals for Pre-Institute workshops lasting either three or six hours through Friday, December 17, 2021. Use this link to submit a Pre-Institute proposal.
For the Institute proper, presentations lasting 30, 60, or 90 minutes may be individual, panel, product, or poster presentations, as well as workshops or round table discussions. We welcome these proposals through Monday, January 17, 2022. Use this link to submit an Institute proposal.
We hope you will join us to enjoy the many events and displays celebrating and commemorating the ACL Institute’s evolution over the last seventy-five years. The last two of those years have taught us the importance of including members who may not be able to travel to the event, and so there will be some pre-recorded presentations and a limited number of Zoom sessions chosen by the Program Committee to offer a chance for everyone to stay connected to th