Conferences

The Association for Core Texts and Courses has, as part of its organizing statement, a pledge to provide fora for the discussion of core texts and their associated courses. Chief among these fora are conferences.

ACTC’s annual conference is an international congress of faculty and administrators of institutions from around the world which gather in the late spring. Our plenary speakers and the attendees from North and South American, European, Middle Eastern, and Asian institutions bring with them the interests and concerns in building liberal arts curricula for undergraduates composed of core texts, that is, world classics.

ACTC publishes, peer-reviewed, Selected Proceedings after every conference. Sample papers are available on this website.

Previous agendas and themes of the conference are trans-disciplinary and broad in scope. ACTC attracts participants from nearly every undergraduate discipline, and many graduate disciplines, as well. Themes emphasize the liberal arts, core texts, and faculty cooperation in interpreting texts, developing curricula and pedagogy, and working with students.

This year’s 18th Annual Conference theme is: Liberal Arts Education and the Real World: Preparing for, Inquiring into, and Living in the Real World through Core Texts.

Annual Conferences are the cooperative effort of sponsoring and co-sponsoring institutions and the offices of ACTC. Our 2012 conference venue is Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sponsoring and co-sponsoring institutions have the opportunity to showcase their institution’s core text (or general education) program in panels reserved exclusively for their institution’s presentation. They are involved in development of theme and selection of plenary speakers, as well as conference recruitment. Interested parties should contact info@coretexts.org

ACTC Student Conferences are offered every other year as a function of cooperative support between ACTC’s Liberal Arts Institute and sponsoring and co-sponsoring institutions. Structured much like the annual conferences, these meetings are marked by papers that are short, five-pages, and center on a core text. The papers and panels emphasize reflection by students on the relation between the core text(s) that they have read and their entire baccalaureate experience. The conference is designed to emphasize essay writing. The best three papers of each conference are published by the Agora, an online, peer/professor-reviewed, student journal of Lynchburg College, which specializes in responses to the great books of the world.

Students must attend a supporting Institutional Member of ACTC. Students must be nominated for participation by a professor from their institutions, and an organizing committee composed of professors and students on the sponsoring campus review the papers and develop the agenda. Co-sponsoring institutions provide material support and volunteers to help chair panels. Interested parties should contact info@coretexts.org

Special Topic Conferences are sponsored by the ACTC Liberal Arts Institute at Saint Mary’s College of California and interested sponsoring institutions. Conference topics may involve research that ACTC has conducted; such was the case in 2006 at our conference on “Trends in the Liberal Arts Core: Cooperative Integration Between the Humanities and Sciences.” Or, conferences may address particular issues in higher education which affect core text, liberal arts education. ACTC is in the early planning stages of two such conferences for 2011. Watch our Institute pages for announcements. Institutions which have ideas for such conferences are welcome to contact the Executive Director of ACTC at info@coretexts.org