General Offerings
In addition to our Core Program, we offer a variety of courses focused on particular great books, ancient languages, and other related subjects. These courses offer opportunities to focus one’s learning in a welcoming intellectual community.
Our courses are open to adults 16 years or older from all educational backgrounds and walks of life. Most courses meet weekly for between 1-2 hours.
Unless otherwise noted, meetings take place online via Zoom.
Reading groups
In a reading group, you choose one or more great books to study and meet regularly for discussions with a group of 8-15 peers.
Discussions are led by an experienced reader and guide in conversation in accordance with our discussion guidelines and core principles.
Intensive reading groups
Intensive reading groups are an opportunity to go deeper with one’s own thinking and the thinking of others.
The size of the group is smaller, allowing each reader more conversational space, and readers are asked to write and share short weekly reflection papers.
Subject tutorials
When possible, we organize small group meetings with a tutor competent in subjects such as: the art of writing, ancient languages, and mathematics.
The number of readers, duration, and mode of instruction all vary according to the subject being taught and the tutor’s approach.
Registration for Fall 2025 is closed.
Join our mailing list for updates about our Spring 2026 term.
Course catalog
Please note: all meeting times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time and dates follow the convention of month/day/year. All workloads are approximate.
Subject Tutorials
Each subject tutorial meets at the listed days and times to study the identified subject. Participants may be given assignments to complete before each meeting: these are given to assist in learning and no grades or credit will be given.
Introductory language tutorials are open to any reader who is willing to put in the effort of learning a new language.
Intermediate language tutorials typically involve the translation of texts and are most appropriate for those who have spent at least a year studying the relevant language.
Advanced language tutorials are appropriate for readers who already have some experience reading texts in the relevant language (for example, through recent participation in intermediate language tutorials).
Please note: all meeting times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time and dates follow the convention of month/day/year. All workloads are approximate.
Introductory ancient Greek
Intermediate ancient Greek
Advanced ancient Greek, Sappho
Introductory Latin
Introductory Latin
Advanced Latin, Horace
Mathematical Proof
Intensive Reading Groups
Groups meet on the identified dates and times to discuss readings in the listed text(s). Readers are expected to write short reflection papers each week and share them with the entire group. Reflection papers are intended as an aid to thinking and conversation, and no grades are given.
Please note: all meeting times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time and dates follow the convention of month/day/year. All reading loads are approximate.
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Plato, Theaetetus
Reading Groups
Groups meet on the identified dates and times to discuss readings in the listed text(s). Unless otherwise noted, meetings are conducted in English and take place online.
Please note: all meeting times are listed in U.S. Eastern Time and dates follow the convention of month/day/year. All reading loads are approximate.
Thomas Aquinas as Philosopher
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle on the Presocratics
Augustine, Confessions
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
IN-PERSON (San Francisco, CA): Jorge Luis Borges, Selected short stories
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya
Carl von Clausewitz, On War
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
Dante, Divine Comedy
Charles Dickens’ ghost stories
IN-PERSON (NYC): Selected poems of John Donne, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell
EN ESPAÑOL: José Donoso, Lugar sin límites
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Double and The Gambler
George Eliot, The Lifted Veil; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper; Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Daphne du Marier, Don’t Look Now; Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market; and Mary Shelley, The Invisible Girl
IN-PERSON (NYC): George Eliot, Middlemarch
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons; and Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Cleves
Recent Philosophy of Meaning: Selected essays by Harry Frankfurt, Thomas Nagel, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
The Book of Genesis
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
IN-PERSON (Washington, DC): Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Henry James, The Ambassadors
James Joyce, Dubliners
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way
Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love
FILM: Krzysztof Kieslowski
FILM: Val Lewton
FILM: David Lynch
Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Book 3)
Plato, Letters
Plato, The Republic
Plato, Sophist
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? and other scientific essays
Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
Shakespeare, Selected comedies
Shakespeare, Henry VIII
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Sophocles, Ajax, Electra and Women of Trachis
EN ESPAÑOL: Suetonio, Vidas de los doce Césares
Fujiwara no Teika, Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each)
Virgil, Aeneid
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Xunzi, Xunzi
EN ESPAÑOL: José Zorrilla, Don Juan Tenorio