We're hosting this student conference for the first time, and it's the largest ACTC has ever convened. The theme of the conference is “The Liberal Arts and Student Reflections on Core Texts.”
Forty-eight student were nominated by ACTC member institutions (with a core curricular program similar to ours) to submit paper proposals; forty proposals were accepted, and, as of today, we expect 37 students to attend. Students will be coming from more than twenty-five colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Two Shimer students will also be presenting papers at the conference. This promises to be an exciting weekend!
The conference will kick-off with a dinner and plenary session on Friday evening. The keynote speaker is Daniel Born, a long-time friend of Shimer College and former vice-president and chief of staff at the Great Books Foundation. Dan currently teaches at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies and is an academic chair in the department of legal studies at Kaplan University. He has published on the English novel (Dickens to H.G. Wells) and on the history of the Great Books. In his talk for the conference, Daniel Born will bring a historical perspective to the study of Great Books and discuss the relevance of such curricula in the 21st century. |