Dear SCS members,
On behalf of the SCS Board of Directors, I am pleased to announce the appointment of Zachary Slates as the new Executive Director of the Society for Classical Studies, effective 6 May 2024.
17 January, 2024
Dear Colleagues,
Dear Members of the Society for Classical Studies:
I write with an update on the Society’s Executive Director position. Two weeks ago I wrote to say that our long-serving Executive Director Helen Cullyer was stepping down effective December 1. Since then, we have been working to finalize the terms of appointment and to bring on board an interim Executive Director, whose role will be to guide the Society and keep it on track until we can appoint a permanent successor to Helen.
Dear members of the Society for Classical Studies:
As an undergraduate Classics student in the 1980s, I read somewhere the story of a Black man who attempted to register to vote in a southern state under Jim Crow. Local election officials administered him a “literacy test. He passed one such “test,” then another and another, including (the story goes) reading texts in Latin and Greek.
The Presidential Panel at the 2021 Annual Meeting will be held on Friday January 8, 5:30-7:30pm CST. Registered attendees can access the panel via the virtual annual meeting platform.
As we all contend with the unprecedented challenges presented by the COVID-19 Coronavirus, I want to start by highlighting a gratifying fact: the indispensable expert and voice of reason, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, majored in Classics as an undergraduate at Holy Cross!
We have now reviewed the video of the Panel on the Future of Classics, which will be disseminated online today, February 14, 2019.
The video makes it clear that what was said to Prof. Padilla Peralta was: “You may have got your job because you’re black, but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
As some of you witnessed personally and all can now read (see, e.g., The Chronicle), the 150th Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies last weekend in San Diego was disgraced by two shocking incidents. One occurred when an independent scholar attending a panel told Princeton Assistant Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta that he got his job because he is black.