This interdisciplinary seminar introduces first-year students to the study of Great Texts, focused on a topic of the instructor’s choosing. Studies center on texts from multiple genres, ranging from ancient to modern times, and may include texts from the fine arts or performing arts when appropriate. Possible topics could include, for example, narrating happiness, the quests of heroes and martyrs, modes of love and suffering, images of death and dying, stories of gods and God.

Interdisciplinary close reading and discussion of ancient literary texts that establish historic contexts for deliberation regarding society, ethics, knowledge, and imaginative enjoyment.

Interdisciplinary close reading and discussion of major literary texts in relation to social, philosophical, and theological contexts of historic development in Western cultures from the medieval to the early modern period.

An undergraduate seminar in the Great Texts of the Middle Ages. Students will read selections from Anselm, Bonaventure, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Moses Maimonides, Julian of Norwich, Chaucer, and others.

An undergraduate seminar in the Great Texts of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early modern age. Students will read selections from Machiavelli, Erasmus, the Protestant reformers and Catholic counter reformation, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Milton, Hobbes, Locke, Vico, and others.

An undergraduate course in seminal texts written or narrated by women of various epochs. Readings may include Sappho, Ban Zhao, Scheherezade, Christine de Pizan, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, Toni Morrison, and others.

An undergraduate seminar in the great texts of Christian spirituality and devotional literature. Readings may include texts by Origen, Augustine, Athanasius, Maximus Confessor, Richard of St. Victor, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, Thomas á Kempis, Luther, Traherne, Law, Bunyan, John and Charles Wesley, Kierkegaard, Sayers, Day, Lewis, Chesterton, and others.

Seminar featuring Americans such as Sojourner Truth, DuBois, Ellison, Hansberry, Baldwin and Morrison, plus non-Americans such as Walcott and Mandela. Discussion of how these authors address questions about basic human goods, frequently under conditions of enslavement, oppression, poverty and the abuse of authority. Reflection on new forms of artistic beauty and literary excellence emerging from these conditions.

Survey and analysis of master works of art, including painting, sculpture, architecture, and photography, in their relationship to the six eras of the Great Texts Seminar Sequence.

Survey and analysis of a selection of the most important dramatic works of the Western intellectual tradition.

An historical overview of the significant developments in the science of the ancient and medieval periods. Students will read selections from Euclid, Archimedes, Pythagorus, Copernicus, Galileo, and others.

An undergraduate seminar devoted to an examination of leaders and the virtues of leadership as found in the Great Texts. Students will read selections from the Bible, Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, St. Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Machiavelli, Dickens, Hardy, Bernanos, Conrad, O'Connor, and others.

An undergraduate seminar devoted to an examination of business, management, and entrepreneurship as presented through some of the great texts of the Western and Eastern traditions.

Readings may extend from antiquity to the present, tracing connections among these disciplines in ways that are not usually contained within the customary modern treatment of a single liberal art.

Readings focus on a selection of major texts or direct instruction in a liberal arts tradition that may range from antiquity to the present, considering how these works address perennial questions of human formation that are debated among Great Texas.

An undergraduate seminar in the Great Texts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Students will read selections from Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, de Tocqueville, Goethe, Austen, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Kierkegaard, Melville, Whitman, Darwin, Stowe, Newman, Mary Shelley, Frederick Douglass, Twain, Nietzsche, and others.

An undergraduate seminar in the Great Texts of the twentieth century. Students will read selections from Yeats, William James, Weber, Freud, Barth, Woolf, Beckett, Faulkner, O'Connor, Lewis, Eliot, Wiesel, Frost, Camus, Solzhenitsyn, Hemingway, Arendt, King, and others.

An undergraduate seminar focusing on the work of Dante Alighieri, especially The Divine Comedy. Other writers and artists such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, Catherine of Siena, Bruni, Ariosto, and Machiavelli may be read. Students will read texts in translation but with frequent reference to the Italian.

An undergraduate seminar in the central texts of two of the chief authors of the Western Christian tradition, Augustine and Aquinas. Attention may be paid to predecessors such as Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, or Cicero, as well as to the influence of Augustine and Aquinas upon other thinkers such as Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Descartes, Nietzsche, Joyce, Eliot, and O'Connor. Attention may also be paid to the influence of Augustine upon Aquinas.

An undergraduate seminar devoted to the study of seminal works in theology, in connection with one or more historical periods, ranging from antiquity to the present. Emphasis will be placed on theological interactions with the literature, philosophy, social science, and/or artistic expression in these eras.

Survey and analysis of seminal landmarks of music in their relationship to the six eras of the Great Texts Seminar Sequence.

An historical overview of the history and development of the natural and social sciences from the Enlightenment to the present. Students will concentrate on the Great Texts of science from Bacon, Vico, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, Kuhn, and others.

An undergraduate senior seminar culminating in a research project which draws upon the works and texts of the Great Texts curriculum. Students will present and defend their senior projects before student colleagues and a faculty panel.

An undergraduate seminar devoted to the genre of confession and autobiography, with a focus on texts that address questions about the kinds of communities, activities and virtues that cultivate true human flourishing. Students will read selections from Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Henry Adams, John Henry Newman, Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Will Campbell, Nelson Mandela, Wendell Berry and others.

Combines readings with observation and practical experience to improve instruction through apprenticeship.

Explores epic and romance texts from France and England in their native vernaculars. Reading competence in Latin (classical or medieval), French (old or modern), or Middle English required.

Research projects to be undertaken by students or by classes under the direct supervision of the professor. Course may be repeated twice with a different topic of study.