Place matters in core texts and courses. In every tradition, one finds texts that explore our place in nature, our place outside of nature, our rootedness and our deracination, our national identity and our cosmopolitanism, our desire for home, for escape, and for utopias. Are we products of our environments that must be considered in our efforts toward self-knowledge, or are we best understood according to placeless and transcendent things? How do we create and effect the places in our lives, and what is our responsibility to those places? Why read and teach texts that emerged from one’s own places, however we define them? Why read and teach texts that come from places foreign to our experience and personal history or that of our students?

We invite proposals for papers and panels that consider the ways core texts convey, consider, and contest views about our place in the oikos and the cosmos, creation, our mindfulness of home, the homeless mind, etc.

ACTC papers should not take more than 15 minutes to present, and about twenty percent of each paper should engage directly with a primary text. ACTC panels should include three to five presenters and a chair, who may also be one of the presenters. It will be up to the chair to determine whether panel papers will be shared before the conference, but it is not conventional to require papers to be submitted before they are presented. We will invite all presenters to submit a longer version of their paper for consideration in a peer reviewed volume of selected essays.  We encourage papers and panels on our conference theme, but we will consider proposals that don’t speak directly to the theme. The proposal deadline is December 29, 2023.