Jacob L. Mackey is Associate Professor of Classics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he teaches Greek and Latin languages and literatures, their transformative reception by African-American writers, their centrality to the American project of self-governance, and their power to transport us beyond our current culture of resentment. He recently changed the focus of his writing from antiquity to the present (and to the relevance of antiquity for the present) in response to what he saw as an existential crisis of our liberal democratic republic that began in 2011 or so and reached a peak in and after 2020.
He is faculty advisor for the student Persuasion club, which provides a space for the free exchange of ideas on campus. He grew up between Austin, TX, and a small village in Kerala, in south India. He is the author of "Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion" (Princeton University Press, 2022), an editor (with Prof. Lawrence Eppard and Prof. Lee Jussim) of "The Poisoning of the American Mind" (George Mason University Press, 2024), and a founding member of Free Black Thought.
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