Through close reading and discussion of a number of modern classics—including Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well—this course will seek to...
Xenophon of Athens was a soldier, philosopher, and friend of Socrates. He composed his own Apology of Socrates and led a military retreat of 10,000 Greek mercenaries across Persia. But he is most...
Thus was Ben Franklin’s quip in response to a query from a curious citizen as to what the Constitutional Convention had come up with. The American Founders were very cognizant of the poor track record...
For almost 50 years since the momentous decision of the United States Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), a woman's right to choose an abortion for at least some period of her pregnancy has been the...
Aeschylus is a powerful and poetic writer who was known for his creative and dramatic staging. This class will delve into Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians, taking up the plays...
Definitely a page-turner and one of the most popular of the blockbuster 19th century French novels, The Count of Monte Cristo is also a surprisingly complex and rich piece of literature. Exploring a...
The Spring Seminar will explore Roman comedy and drama, starting with Roman comic novel, The Golden Ass, and Plautus’ comic play Manaechmi. Then we will read three plays connected with the myth of...
In this Winter Quarter seminar, we consider a set of distinctively American writers and ideas. First we examine William James’ Pragmatism, in which James describes and defends our country’s most...
We begin the sequence with a consideration of America’s colonial heritage and of the forces and ideas that shaped its emergence into nationhood. In the seminar, we will reflect on the country’s uneasy...
In the winter quarter, we explore certain features of the young democracy's emergent consciousness—individualistic, fractious, idealistic and critical—as well as of the persistent struggle to define...