Convocation to Kick Off New Academic Year at Washington and Lee The event will be held at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 3 on the Front Lawn with remarks by Alexandra R. Brown, Fletcher Otey Thomas Professor of Bible.

By Brian Laubscher
August 19, 2025

The Washington and Lee University community is invited to celebrate a new academic year with Convocation at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 3 on the Front Lawn. Dinner will follow on Cannan Green. This event is a great opportunity to meet the first-year undergraduate and law students as well as to welcome seniors and third-year law students back for their final year.

Alexandra R. Brown, Fletcher Otey Thomas Professor of Bible at W&L, will deliver this year’s remarks, titled “Learn we are keepers only: the rest is commentary.”

“We are inheritors of a deeply intercultural, transdisciplinary and manifoldly diverse tradition — the tradition of the seven liberal arts — practices of thought and imagination not only befitting the free person but begetting freedom,” said Brown. “The tradition extends from classical Greece through the development of monasteries in the Middle Ages to the rise of the university and its transformation in modern times. Like every living tradition, it is continually under revision. That is how it lives; that is its nature. We are called together in convocation as ‘keepers’ not of a static canon but of a shared humanity, that saturated mutuality on which the future of the planet depends.”

The W&L community can also watch Brown’s address via livestream.

Brown began her career as a member of the W&L faculty in 1987 as an instructor in religion, before becoming an assistant professor, associate professor and professor. She has served as department head for the Religion Department on three occasions while holding endowed professorships as the Jessie Ball duPont Professor of Religion and currently as the Fletcher Otey Thomas Professor of Bible. She also serves as a core faculty member with the Middle East and South Asia Studies Program and is an affiliated faculty member with the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program.

Brown’s primary focus is New Testament studies and particularly in the letters of Paul. In addition to biblical and ancient Christian literature, she teaches across a wide range of subjects in religious studies, including courses in Christian mystics, pilgrimage, religion and film, and theory and method in the study of religion. She authored “The Cross and Human Transformation: Paul’s Apocalyptic Word in 1 Corinthians” and co-edited “Putting Body & Soul Together: Essays in Honor of Robin Scroggs” and the forthcoming “Noli Me Tangere: Touch in a Time of Pandemics.” She is also currently writing the 1 Corinthians commentary for the “New Testament Library.”

A member of Omicron Delta Kappa, Brown earned a Ph.D. in religion/biblical studies from Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in religion from Duke University and a Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School.