Associate Professor of Classical Studies Peter Struck to Serve as Co-Director of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education

The Teagle Foundation has awarded a grant of $392,500 to fund the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, a three-year program designed to identify and prepare emerging academic leaders. The grant will be administered through Penn, and the program will be co-directed by Associate Professor of Classical Studies Peter Struck and Sarah Igo, an associate professor of history, sociology and political science at Vanderbilt University.

Through twice-yearly seminars on educational theory, practice and policy, the forum aims to stimulate intensive conversations among the next generation of top scholars, with junior faculty participants drawn from across the disciplines at the nation’s leading public and private research universities. The program’s goal is to influence the practices and sympathies of these scholars at a formative moment in their development, such that when they arrive at positions of academic and institutional leadership, they will be ready to inspire and innovate.

Currently serving as director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars program, Peter Struck has also been undergraduate chair of Classical Studies and directed the department’s post-baccalaureate program. During the previous academic year he served as topic director of the Penn Humanities Forum. He has held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and is currently a fellow in residence at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His book Birth of the Symbol won the American Philological Association’s 2007 Goodwin Award for best book in the field of classics. Since 2003 has worked as a consultant with the Teagle Foundation on national-level initiatives.

Established in 1944 and based in New York City, the Teagle Foundation is committed to providing intellectual and financial leadership in the effort to promote and strengthen liberal education.