Public understandings of the liberal arts tend to amount to an introductory curriculum of texts in the humanist tradition. This project seeks funding to host a special session at Modern Language Association’s annual convention in Jan 2024, inviting new research intended to broaden, deepen and restore the origins of liberal arts beyond modern European conceptions to include classical, pre-classical, non- European and global findings on the subject. Beyond introductory curricula, the session attempts to revisit the notion of the liberal arts as training for political, legal and professional leadership, in the words of Isocrates’ Antidosis, the “καλῶν ἐπιτηδευμάτων”/good achievements that would in turn be a cause for celebration.

 Please send a 200 word abstract and short bio to sohanagrainger@gradcenter.cuny.edu

The origins of the liberal arts are typically located at the works of Cicero, Seneca the Younger and Martianus Capella, who used such broad phrasings as “manner of life”, “use of judgment and prudence” and “reception of virtue” as part of a larger attempt to collate what it meant to deserve and merit one’s elite status in society. There is a fairly large and various body of scholarship on the history of the liberal arts, one that intertwines it with associated scholarly domains such as the humanities, the fine arts and the arts and sciences. Whatever these terms have come to mean in contemporary parlance, there is a distinct meaning for the liberal arts which appears to have eroded in recent decades: one in which liberal arts formed the kind of training appropriate to statesmen and society’s problem solvers, who, using the practices of speaking, writing, interpretation, negotiation, and consensus-building can, as Henri Marrou wrote in his 1948 history of education in antiquity, “free the rest of the Greeks of their present troubles.”

The stakes in our time of course could not be higher, both for the broader social outcomes of higher education and for the university itself. This project is a call to re-animate the conversation around the liberal arts and leadership– between the practices of literary study (interpretation, criticism, speaking, etc) and the practical needs of society. Justifications for higher education in the liberal arts are often founded on such loose notions as forming “well-rounded” individuals, but the under-articulated fact about such study is that it in fact is training for individuals to become managers of teams of specialists, upholders of ethical standards, and reformers of calcified organizations, institutions, and bureaucracies.

The session proposed for this convention is an attempt to expand the professional scope of the liberal arts by reanimating discussions around what liberal arts practitioners can bring to public life, and what achievements they can become capable of– meriting celebration not only in the form of certification by diploma, but by taking an active role in the public discussion surrounding broader social problems.