Joy Connolly Elected President of the American Council of Learned Societies

Joy Connolly has been elected president of the American Council of Learned Societies. She will assume her duties on July 1, 2019.

Currently, Dr. Connolly serves as interim president and distinguished professor of classics at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Previously, she served as provost and senior vice president of the Graduate Center. She has also served as dean for the humanities, a professor of classics, and director of the College Core Curriculum at New York University. Before joining NYU, she served as an assistant professor of classics at both Stanford University and the University of Washington.

As a scholar, Dr. Connolly studies Greek and Roman literature and political thought, as well as their transformation in the modern era. She is the author of The Life of Roman Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 2014) and The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton University Press, 2007).

“Research in the humanities and social sciences sustains the knowledge and capacities necessary to maintain a robust and ever more inclusive democracy,” said Dr. Connolly. “I am honored and thrilled at the prospect of leading the American Council of Learned Societies, which supports outstanding work in these fields. Building on Pauline Yu’s success, I look forward to advancing ACLS’s mission to advocate for the value of research among diverse publics, to make more resources available to scholars, and to work with ACLS’s over 70 member organizations on the complex challenges that face us today as scholars, teachers, and citizens.”

Dr. Connolly is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University where she majored in classics. She holds a Ph.D. in classics from the University of Pennsylvania.