SCS Newsletter - August 2017 ("Rhetoric Then and Now")

Rhetoric: Then and Now

by Michele Renee Salzman, Professor of History, University of California at Riverside

As Vice President of the Program Division of the Society for Classical Studies, I am delighted to announce that a special panel, "Rhetoric: Then and Now," will take place at the upcoming Annual Meeting in January 2018 in Boston.

The Program Committee has planned this special plenary panel to address a large and contemporary issue: how do the political and rhetorical theories and practices of the ancient world illuminate current developments? In light of increasing economic inequality, entrenched political divisions, eruptions of violence in the US and abroad, and the fraught relationship between political rhetoric, truth, and evidence, the committee feels that such a panel is not just timely but in fact essential.

To address this broad topic, the Committee has asked each panelist to speak for ten minutes in order to allow for ample time for audience participation. The panel will include four Classicists working on rhetoric, along with Mark Thompson, President and CEO of the New York Times and former Director General of the BBC. He is also the author of "Enough Said: What's Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics?" (St. Martin's Press, 2016) and has been a visiting professor of Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at the University of Oxford.

The other panelists include:

Joy Connolly, the Provost and Senior Vice President of the City University of New York's Graduate Center. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has published extensively on Roman rhetoric and politics. Her most recent book is The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 2014). Prof. Connolly is also a contributor to the Village Voice.

Curtis Dozier, Visiting Assistant Professor at Vassar College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and researches ancient rhetoric, particularly Roman oratory and literary criticism. He has a rather prolific resume of public scholarship, ranging in scope from salon.com to Eidolon, and works as a faculty administrator for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Johanna Hanink, Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the cultural life of ancient Athens, and her most recent work - The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Harvard University Press, 2017) – discusses the impact of modern attitudes about ancient Greece in the context of the contemporary Greek debt crisis.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University, focusing on mid-Republican Rome. His book - Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin Press, 2015) - details a rather spectacular academic journey, and has received as much attention from publications like the New York Times as his essays on Eidolon have received from Classicists themselves.

Paul Allen Miller, Carolina Distinguished Professor & Vice Provost and Director of International Programs in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina. Paul is author of Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato (Oxford University Press, 2016). He will be the moderator.

We hope that you will join us in Boston for this important event. The panel is scheduled for Saturday, January 6, 2018 from 5:00 – 6:45 pm and will be followed by the Presidential Reception in honor of our current President S. Georgia Nugent.