A leading US academic will explore what ancient Rome can teach us about freedom, civic life and political responsibility at the Newell Classical Event.
Professor Joy Connolly, a professor of Classics and President of the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), will give this year’s Newell Classical Event talk, Meeting the conditions of freedom: Roman political thought in an age of tyranny and greed.
The lecture will be followed by a conversation on the issues it raises with Dr Shushma Malik, Associate Professor of Classics at the University Cambridge, ahead of an audience Q&A.
The annual Newell Classical Event was established in 2015 following a generous bequest from a St John’s alumnus. The aim is to celebrate all that is exciting, creative and forward-thinking in the world of Classics, and bring it to the attention of a wide public.
For many people today, preoccupied with individual wellbeing and the flaws of democratic politics, Roman republican political thought offers a bracing view of human interdependence and identity. In her talk, Professor Connolly will concentrate not on abstract principles but on the embodied experiences and habits of thought that thinkers like Cicero viewed as crucial for civic thriving – proof of the value of the ancient archive as a resource for alternative thinking.
Professor Connolly has been President of the ACLS since 2019. She previously served as provost and interim president of The Graduate Centre at the City University of New York, where she was also Distinguished Professor of Classics, and at New York University, where she served as Dean for the Humanities from 2012-16.
She has published two books with Princeton University Press and more than 80 articles, reviews, and short essays. Her current book in progress, All the World’s Pasts, argues for a global approach to the study of the world’s ancient cultures.
Dr Malik is Onassis Classics Fellow of Newnham College and her book The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020.
The Newell Classical Event 2026 will take place in the Palmerston Room, Fisher Building, St John’s College, on Thursday 28 May, 7-8pm. Members of the public are welcome to attend and booking is not required.
