News

New Appointments to Ramsay Program in Western Civilisation

ACU is delighted to announce the first two in a group of teaching appointments to the new Ramsay Program in Western Civilisation.

Dr Kishore Saval has been appointed as professor of literature, coming to ACU from School of Literature, Art, and Media at Sydney University, and most recently a sessional lecturer at Campion College.

Dr Tyler Paytas will take up the role of lecturer in philosophy in the Ramsay Program, transferring from his current role as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at ACU.

These appointments follow the appointment of Professor Robert Carver as the inaugural Director of the ACU Ramsay Program in Western Civilisation.

The new appointments will be part of a dedicated teaching team for ACU’s Ramsay students, working out of the new purpose-built space at the North Sydney campus.

Dr Saval has published widely on literature Aeschylus to the present day, and specialises in Shakespeare and the Renaissance. He was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University, where he taught survey courses in English literature from Beowulf to the present day, and an assistant professor at Brown University, where he taught many of the great tragic, lyric, epic, and prose works of European culture in the Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and English traditions.

Dr Paytas specialises in ethics, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He is the co-editor of Kantian and Sidgwickian Ethics: The Cosmos of Duty Above and the Moral Law Within (co-edited (with Tim Henning) and the co-author of the forthcoming Plato’s Pragmatism: Rethinking the Relationship between Ethics and Epistemology (with Nicholas Baima).

The Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) will commence in 2021, offering students a structured and integrated humanities curriculum from antiquity to the present.

Through the generous support of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, students will be offered an outstanding opportunity to receive one of 30 scholarships of up to $30 000 per year. Scholarship students will also be offered sponsored overseas travel.

ACU’s Ramsay Centre will join with other Ramsay Programs at the University of Wollongong and University of Queensland to form a community of scholars teaching the most exciting texts (from Homer to Walcott, Plato to Wittgenstein, Aquinas to Ratzinger) to students ready to be energised by the rich dialogue and interdisciplinarity of a genuine liberal arts program. The University is delighted to welcome Professor Carver to his new leadership position and is committed to supporting the Ramsay Program in helping revitalise humanities education throughout Australia.

Interested students should apply now for very generous scholarships in the BA (Western Civilisation). More information is available here.