“Rejuvenating and Reinventing the Liberal Arts in the 21st Century: An introduction to the Texts of the Trivium, from the Ancients to Modernity.”

An Association for Core Texts and Courses Liberal Arts Institute Summer Seminar

At the University of Chicago Campus, Chicago, IL

Funded by the ACTC Liberal Arts Institute, the Bradley Foundation, and a private donor who wishes to encourage thinking about and using the liberal arts.

Sunday, July 17, 2022 to Tuesday, July 26, 2022



The Association of Core Texts and Courses is pleased to announce our 2022 Summer Seminar, Rejuvenating and Reinventing the Liberal Arts, to be held Sunday July 17 to Tuesday July 26 on the campus of the University of Chicago. This seminar is built upon the foundations of the seminar of the same name sponsored by ACTC in the summer of 2019. We invite applications from teams of two institutional representatives for this two-week development project for core courses and programs.

This project will achieve greater use of classical to modern core liberal arts texts in college curricula. The seminar emphasizes the centrality of art and the intellectual work of invention. These developed capacities of invention and art imply greater freedom for students and teachers through education in the liberal arts.

The 2022 project seeks to have 10 institutional teams of two. Our team leaders have developed a syllabus of selection of texts from the liberal arts tradition, concentrating on the trivium, but with texts from the wider arts and sciences, as well. Our seminar emphasizes practiced acquisition of the liberal arts by our participating faculty’s students, including public presentations by them. A day of participant leadership is planned towards the seminar’s end, wherein combined faculty teams – now equipped with immersion in the historical development of the liberal arts – will lead discussion on some 19th and 20th century texts. The project also provides an opportunity for leaders and participants to participate in inventing a new liberal art – an “erotics” of art (an art of loving art) that Susan Sontag called for. 

The project will include both past participants in our summer 2019 Rejuvenating and Reinventing seminar and new participants to amplify and widen appreciation and use of liberal arts texts across each institution for implementation of curricular reforms, designs, and inventions.

Team Seminar Leaders, Joshua Parens, Dean, Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts University of Dallas and J. Scott Lee, author of Invention: The Art of the Liberal Arts, will lead the 2022 seminar.


For additional information, please contact:

Charlotte Thomas, Executive Director of ACTC, thomas_cc@mercer.edu

J. Scott Lee, jscottlee@coretexts.org

Tess Makanas, info@coretexts.org


We hope that you and your colleagues from institutions around the world will join us.


Sincerely,

Charlotte Thomas, ACTC Executive Director

J. Scott Lee, Seminar Organizer