CFP: 1st International Graduate Conference (Classical Association of Ghana)

The Classical Association of Ghana invites graduate students and early career researchers (with not more than two years research experience after PhD) to submit abstracts (and, subsequently, papers based on the abstracts) for our maiden two-day international graduate conference, taking place (in person) on December 16-17, 2025, at the University of Ghana, Legon.

In this conference, we seek to explore ‘vice’ and its various manifestations and effects. Vice is traditionally conceived as that which is deficient or falls short of good. It manifests in several ways: the social (epistemic injustice: when a hearer gives a deflated credibility to a speaker not based on the merit of the speaker’s discourse but due to either race, gender, religious identity, or any such reason, Fricker 2009); the political (kakistocracy: bad governance, political corruption; kakonomia, bad constitution); the moral (licentiousness, sloth, greed due to the competitive strength of pleonectic hankerings over continence or moderation). Our goal is to invite graduate students and early career researchers in Classics and Philosophy to explore this important concept.

Thematic areas to explore include, but are far from being limited to, the following:

·      The nature and metaphysics of vice (a self-destructive entity?)

·      Agency, freewill, and vice

·      Political corruption

·      Epistemic Injustice

·      Bad laws and governance

·      The phenomenology of hate

·      Thucydides on the origin of stasis and polemos

·      Hubris and Apotheosis

·      The psychology of evil

·      Greek tragedy and vice (e.g., infanticide, matricide, uxoricide, conjuxide, etc.)

·      God, humans, and the limits of piety and reason (e.g. Oedipus’ fate, Creon and Antigone on right decision making)

·      The origin of evil

·      African concept of evil

Submitted abstracts should be between 300-500 words. Those whose abstracts are selected will be given a four-month period to submit their full papers. Each presenter will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for Q & A. Each paper will be assigned a responder, a senior researcher in the thematic area selected.

Please send abstracts as pdf to [email protected] and [email protected] with the subject line “Graduate Conference in Ghana”. 

The conference is generously supported by Princeton Africa World Initiative, Princeton University, and Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. Travelling bursaries (from your main capital cities, e.g., Johannesburg, to Accra) are available for successful applicants from universities in Africa. Please indicate in your submission if you would like to be considered for a bursary.

Conference organisers

Stephen Peprah (PhD) (University of Ghana & University of Toronto)

Michael Okyere Asante (University of Cambridge & UESD, Somanya)