Seminar Descriptions

UPCOMING SEMINARS (October-December 2026)

Check back for notices about changes or cancellations prior to the starting date. 

All Times Eastern Daylight (EDT March 8-November 1) & Eastern Standard Time (EST Nov 1-March) unless Daylight Saving Time becomes permanent.

DESCRIPTIONS

Hobbes, Leviathan (12 sessions)

Sundays, 11a-12:30p ET | Oct 4-Dec 20

Leader: John Samples

Steven Smith of Yale University has said that Thomas Hobbes “was the author of the first and undoubtedly the greatest work of political theory written in the English language.” This seminar will closely read this “first and greatest” work, Leviathan published in 1651. Hobbes sought to shift political thought away from classical notions of virtue toward modern secularism, individualism, and natural rights. He offered a government of human design meant to fulfill human purposes. Leviathan was a turning point in Western political history, a book that continues to shape our lives in ways that are both clear and obscure. A close consideration of Leviathan might thus advance our understanding of both ourselves and our world.

    Book: The Essential Leviathan: A Modernized Version. Ed. Nancy Stanlick. Hackett Publishing.

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Nabokov, Lolita (12 sessions)

Sundays, afternoon (TBA) ET | Oct 4-Dec 20

Leader: Irfan Khawaja

Description forthcoming.

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Beginning Ancient Greek (12 sessions) 

Sundays, 7:30-9:30p ET | Oct 4-Dec 27

Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga & Eric Stull

This language seminar is intended for beginners who have no or almost no background in classical Greek, as well as for those who wish to refresh their rusty, basic Greek of long ago.  Following our lighter approach this summer, this seminar takes the next step in the journey by starting again from the beginning, with a more methodical approach, but no less enjoyable – for those who take pleasure in languages.  Most Greek textbooks are written for fulltime high school and college students, in immersive programs.  They generally assume a student will dedicate 2-4 hours per day at a minimum.  Very few working adults are able to make this much time.  We will be using a contemporary UK text written for 13 and 14 year old students in freshman and sophomore years of high school in England and Wales, most of them taking Greek as an extracurricular on top of their regular classes.  As one might expect, lessons are clumped in short, digestible morsels. If you can dedicate at least one solid hour to Greek per day, this class is for you.  Once we have completed this course, the intention is to continue at a more demanding level toward basic reading knowledge.  This stepped approach then would greatly ease the later course and help shorten the required daily study time.  

     Text:  Taylor, John, Greek to GCSE Part 1, Revised ed.: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, 205 pp., paperback, ISBN 978 1 4742 5516 5.  Once we have finished Part 1, we will continue to the concluding Part 2.  Publisher’s website: Greek to GCSE: Part 1: Revised edition for OCR GCSE Classical Greek (9–1): John Taylor: Bloomsbury Academic - Bloomsbury   Answer keys will be provided to all exercises.  A very handy grammar reference is Mondi, Robert and Peter L. Corrigan, A Student Handbook of Greek and English Grammar: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2013, 150 pp. Paperback ISBN 9 781 624660368.  Publisher’s website: A Student Handbook of Greek and English Grammar   Unless you are already quite familiar with Greek grammar, especially the verb, this second book is strongly recommended.

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Mathematics Track TBA 

Mondays, 1-3p ET | Oct 5-Dec 28

Leaders: Eric Stull & Esa Palosaari

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Zola, Germinal (13 sessions)

Monday, 5-6:30p ET | Oct 5-Dec 28

Leader: Thomas Riordan

Émile Zola, the great nineteenth-century naturalist novelist, beckons us to wander with Étienne Lantier, a homeless, destitute young man, through northern France’s coal country and into the company town called Two Hundred and Forty. Here, impoverished miners, wealthy mine owners, petit-bourgeois shopkeepers, École-trained engineers, and political firebrands mix in a volatile ragout served up to the ravenous coal mine La Voreux, “crouching like some evil beast at the bottom of its lair, . . . puffing and panting in increasingly slow, deep bursts as if it were struggling to digest its meal of human flesh.” Set during the Second Empire (1852–1870), Zola subjects his characters to extreme social and economic pressures — and does not flinch from what he finds.

     We, along with Étienne, will live among the exploited men, women, and children of Two Hundred and Forty and witness how generational trauma, biological necessity, and unpredictable political and natural forces bear down on notions of moral agency and free will. What possible futures beyond mere survival, if any, remain open to people ground down by such conditions? Is hope an inspiration to action and salvation, or a dangerous daydream that leads somewhere far worse? And can La Voreux — with its

insatiable hunger, seemingly beyond anyone’s control — ever be appeased?

     Germinal, the thirteenth novel in Zola’s twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, is considered one of his masterpieces. At the time of his death in 1902, his literary reputation in France was second only to Victor Hugo’s in the esteem of the French public; 50,000 citizens gathered in Paris for his funeral. His influence reached across the Atlantic, inspiring American naturalist writers including Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair. Zola wrote that “naturalist novelists are conscious of their social role; they are physicians, examining magistrates, reformers. . . . We seek the causes and conditions of [physical] illnesses in man; we act on these causes and conditions to master and cure them. . . . The same applies to human passions.”

     Recommended text: Penguin Classics, Tr. Roger Pearson (2004)  (Roughly 40-45 pages a week)

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Vergil in Latin (cont.)

Mondays, 7-9p ET | Oct 5

Leader: Eric Stull

Do you ever wonder how poets keep getting better even after they’re dead?  How do they do that?  Not to say, despite glib assertions to the contrary, that death is always a good career move for a poet.  Take Vergil, for instance: that unplanned, ill-advised ferry ride across the Adriatic nearly got The Aeneid killed along with its author.  Fortunately the big shot who persuaded the poet to change his plans and ended up conveying him to his demise had the good sense to save the poem at least.  In the two years we have spent crawling and toddling across the poet’s page, like a baby across a rug finding countless things to interest (and to worry her dear father!), we have at last arrived with the poem’s  reluctant hero at the image, on an otherwise unknown foreign wall, of the war that set him and his traveling companions adrift on a sea of tears – brutal, pitiless, unrelenting – where only on great and rare occasion mentem mortalia tangunt.  The poem and the poet, which we will keep taking as steadily as we may, always in hope of being joined by fellow voyagers, keep getting better. 

Text: Pharr’s Aeneid (ISBN: 9780865164215)

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Homer, Iliad (24 sessions)

Mondays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 5

Leader: Christian Blood

Homer’s Iliad has many excellent successors, but nothing can take its place. The Iliad is not only the fountainhead of poetry; it is probably its greatest summit.  It is not only like a great mountain river rushing on with irresistible strength and unbearable beauty, staying in the mountains for a long time before making its spectacular descent through a world almost too rugged to be lived in, yet impossible not to dwell with once visited, its water bearing all before it through the shining plain; it is also like the mountain itself and the sea toward which its waters tend. 

     The poem is thus a world, about a world.  Is this world simply the world as such: elemental, profound, brutal, fecund, brilliant, terrible, filled with women and men, love and hate, gods, animals, plants, earth, sun, air, sky, sea? What else is there, really?  One thing, perhaps: pteroenta, winged things--words.  A reader keeping their ear to the poem’s ground may hear the words alighting within the range of their hearing.  There is nothing else like it under the sun--this sun to the sea of song that has followed it. We will read the Iliad slowly: a book a week, an hour and a half at a time, for 24 meetings -- and then we will meet one final time to wonder at what we just did.

     Text: Recent generations of English-language Iliad readers have been well served by Richmond Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald, and more recently Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo. Renderings by Herbert Jordan, Rodney Merrill, Michael Reck, Joe Sachs, Caroline Alexander, and Peter Green also all have their benefits. I will be reading Emily Wilson's 2023 translation, and I recommend it highly. Overall, our discussions will be more convenient if everyone in a group has the same translation; at the same time, it's illuminating when we can compare different renderings. Ultimately, the choice of translation is yours, so long as it is in verse and provides line numbers

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Listeners Studio: Early Jazz (6 sessions)

Tuesdays, 12-1:30p ET | Nov 10-Dec 15

Leader: Jeff Johnston

It swings. It's cool. From its origins in New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong, to Duke Ellington in New York, to Earl Hines in Chicago, to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald worldwide, jazz was "the quintessential American art form." This seminar will explore the music of the first jazz artists and trace the development of early jazz.

     Music: recordings and sheet music will be made available.

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Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz & Benito Feijoo (13 sessions)

Tuesdays, 3-4:30p ET | Oct 6-Dec 29

Leader: Miryam Bujanda

Arc of Modernity with Great Books of Iberia returns!  This seminar pairs the two earliest feminist writings in Western modernity, and poems by the first author who also closed out the Spanish Siglo de Oro in literature.  

     Juana Ines de Asabaje y Ramirez de Santayana was born in San Miguel Nepatlanta (near Mexico City), New Spain, 1648, the illegitimate daughter of naval Captain don Pedro Manuel de Asajue y Vargas-Machuca, involved in transatlantic commerce and shipping, and the wealthy criolla dona Isabel Ramirez de Santillana y Rendon.  She grew up on her maternal grandfather’s haciendas de Nepatlanta and de Panoyan, where she was given access to his very large and rich library.  By age 3 she was reading and writing Latin, by age 5 she could keep accounting books, by age 8 she had written a poem on the Eucharist, by age 13 she had mastered Greek, logic, and was teaching Latin to the hacienda children.  At 16 she was sent to live with relatives in the vice-regal capital, Mexico City, and she asked permission of her mother to attend the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico disguised as a boy.  Her mother declined, but Juana Ines became a lady-in-waiting to the Vicereine dona Eleanora del Carreto, a daughter of the scion of one of Italy's most aristocratic families, and wife of the viceroy the Marques of Mancera.  Juana tutored one of the daughters, and her intelligence and learning attracted much notice at court.  The viceroy arranged a quod libet and invited eminent theologians, philosophers, jurists, and poets.  All were astonished.  She received several marriage proposals, all of which she declined.  Thereafter she became known as “the Tenth Muse” and “the Phoenix of America.”  Instead, in 1677, she entered a convent, where her cell was a salon for women intellectuals, including two successive vicereines.  She amassed a library of more than 4,000 volumes, and an extensive cabinet of scientific and musical instruments.  She is known by her religious name Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz OSH.  We will read her poetic masterpiece, “First Dream/Sleep,” the letter in which she dismisses her confessor, the letter to her by the bishop of Puebla using a pseudonym, and her famous reply.

     Benito Jeronimo Feijoo y Montenegro, born 1676 in Galicia and died 1764 in Asturias, was a Benedictine monk 1690-1764, professor of philosophy and theology, a leading figure in the European Enlightenment, and the man who started university reforms in XVIII C. Spain.  He was appalled by the popular superstitions of his day.  Among his 19 volumes of essays, in vol. I of his Teatro critico universal there is his famous Sixteenth Discourse, “A Defense of Women: Equality despite Difference” of 1726.  In his lifetime, somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 copies of his work were sold throughout Europe, widely translated into French, English, German, Italian, and Portuguese.  Between 1728 and 1788 at least 115 books were written on Fiejoo’s work.  Attacks ceased in Spain when King Fernando VI forbade them.  We will read the first ten of twenty-four sections running to 73 pages, newly translated into English in 2010 for the first time since the XIX C.   

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Pre-Socratics: Inquiries into Nature (12 sessions)

Tuesdays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 6-Dec 29

Leader:  Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga

Let us read the very beginnings of Western philosophy, as it was brought into being.  See for yourself the origins and setting of the problems later addressed by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others, down to our own day: “the Problem of the One and the Many.”  We will pay close attention to Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, the early Pyathagoreans, among others in The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Prescocratics, Part I, trans. and ed. Daniel W. Graham: Cambridge University Press, 2010; also, perhaps, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd. ed., trans. and ed. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield: Cambridge University Press, 1983.  We may also consider Eva Brann's brief book, The Logos of Heraclitus, Paul Dry Books, 2011; Jacob Klein’s lecture of 6 March 1939 at the University of Virginia, “The Concept of Number in Greek Mathematics and Philosophy”; and, Andre Lak’s short book, The Concept of Presocratic Philosophy: Its Origin, Development, and Significance, trans. Glenn W. Most: Princeton University Press, 2018.  In 2027, Aristotle’s Physics, is on the docket, for which this is, while not a necessary background, a very helpful one.

     The main readings will be provided in PDF.  The Brann book mentioned above will have to be procured by participants.    

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An Introduction to Symposium: Aurelius, Meditations (8 sessions - FREE)

Tuesdays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 20-Dec 8

Leader: Jason Happel

This introduction to our way of reading is free for participants who are new to Symposium Institute. Our way is called “shared inquiry,” and most of us learn it over many years by participating in 12- to 24-week seminars. Some cohorts have spent two years reading Aristotle line-by-line; others work within the limitations of modern life and secure time to meet for an hour and a half, in the day or evening, one or two days a week. This short seminar is an opportunity to read a book together, reflect on your own lifelong education, and to develop fundamental skills and expectations that can support that education and your participation in our reading community. Now, if Aurelius wrote, “Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted.” (Meditations, Book 2, Section 5), this choice of texts to introduce an organization dedicated to reading is odd. But there are advantages to starting here: we can try to make sense of what the author is up to, and we can think about our own reading practices. Do we consume or read? What is reading, what is a book, what are the Meditations? Does reading well and conversing with others require a kind of moral preparation or effort? Or, does the process work automatically, no matter how opinionated or argumentative, how scholarly or loose with language participants are? In this seminar, we will try to understand Aurelius’s writing, the words on the page that we approach through shared inquiry; but we will not spend time on Stoicism or Marcus Aurelius’s reign as a Roman emperor.

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Shakespeare, Henry VI-3 (12 sessions)

Wednesdays, 2-3:30 pm ET | Oct 7-Dec 23

Leader: Eric Stull

If it were Jack Cade who says he wants to “kill all the lawyers,” we might charge Mr. Cade with being a little uncharitable, but it is not the great rouser of public passion who speaks these words, though he seems to agree with the sentiment, when he replies to their speaker: “is not this a lamentable thing, that of the innocent skin of a lamb should be made parchment; that parchment, being scribbled o’er, should undo a man?” (2H6, 4.2.72-75) Did the son of a glover write that line? Just asking. Did the poet make or unmake Jack Cade in this play? Both, maybe? He does not survive his own rebellion, but after 400 years’ continuous appearance in print, we can safely say he won’t soon be disappearing from parchment. The poet makes him illiterate but eloquent: he speaks in prose and verse, but could not read the play in which he dies immortally. Even if we fancy a neat formula in which history happens in prose and gets turned into verse in drama, we still have to ask, how can music be made of civil strife as monstrous as that of the Wars of the Roses? Shake the pen the right way and the spear writes itself?

     Text: any standard edition (e.g., Arden, Riverside, Folger, Signet, Pelican, Yale, Oxford) with act, scene, line numbers

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Plato, Phaedrus (12 sessions)

Wednesdays, 5:30-7p ET | Oct 7-Dec 23

Leader: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga

This is one of Plato’s central dialogues, and concerns language, desire, the city and citizens, immanence and transcendence, technique and wisdom–it is a brief, and very rich dialogue.  You are asked to acquire the translation by Joe Sachs, Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2023, ISBN 978-1-58988-177-8.  Two other outstandingly excellent translations will be made available online in PDF:  James H. Nichols Jr., Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus: Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Politics, in the Agora Editions series, ed. Thomas Pangle, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8014-8532-0; and, William S. Cobb, The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, in the Ancient Greek philosophy series, ed. Anthony Preus, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1993, ISBN 0-7914-1618-6.  We will make judicious use of the ancillary pedagogic matter in these books.  Weekly reading will be about 10 pp., generally. 

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Joyce, Dubliners (12 sessions)

Series:  From Dubliners to Portrait to Ulysses: Joyce’s Apprenticeship in Seeing & Being (3 quarters)

Wednesdays, 7-8:30p ET | Oct 7-Dec 23

Leader: Randy Wootton, Richard Northing, Laura Parcells

Note: You don’t have to sign up for all 3 parts. You can join us in the fall, the winter and/or the spring. 

This three-part series traces James Joyce’s development from the spare realism of Dubliners, through the formation of an artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to his expansive modernist experiment of Ulysses. Throughout the year, we will explore his evolution, from thinking about Dublin in the late 19th/early 20th century as a place of paralysis, to Stephen Dedalus’ struggle for artistic freedom, to the transformation of one ordinary day into a modern epic of consciousness, memory, body, history, and human connection.  

     The arc of these 3 texts is rooted in paralysis, escape, and return. Specifically, Joyce begins by exploring Dublin’s trapped souls, then follows the artist (Stephen) who believes he must leave home, and finally discovers via Bloom in Ulysses the value of understanding and exploring everyday Dublin life.

Fall: Dubliners

Dubliners introduces Joyce’s moral and artistic world through a sequence of compressed stories about childhood, adolescence, adulthood, public life, and death. The central question we will explore is” Why people fail to act even when they glimpse the truth of their condition?” We will explore paralysis, failed escape, family obligation, religion, colonial Dublin, money, shame, and epiphany.

Winter: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows Stephen Dedalus as he explores language, self-consciousness, rebellion, and the meaning of being an artist. Joyce’s style develops with Stephen’s mind, making the novel both a coming-of-age story and a portrayal of artistic self-creation. It is truly the story of the tortured artist in the modern world.We will explore whether Stephen’s flight from family, Church, and Ireland is liberation, evasion, or both.

Spring/Summer: Ulysses

Ulysses returns us to Dublin on June 16, 1904, but now Joyce is exploring the full modernist range of expression. Moreover, he expands his study of Stephen to include Leopold Bloom as a counterweight to Stephen’s abstraction. And, of course, there is Molly who acts as another counterweight to these complicated men. 

     We will read passages from Homer’s Odyssey in parallel to explore the similarities and differences between an ancient and modern epic. In Ulysses, Dublin becomes an epic field of wandering, grief, desire, comedy, rhetoric, memory, and return. Finally, we will explore this text as Joyce’s act of artistic re-entry into the world he once tried to escape, even if he does not actually physically return to Ireland.

Text(s): Dubliners: Centennial Edition. Penguin Classics: Deluxe Edition

Portrait: TBD

Ulysses: The Gabler Edition

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Early Irish Poetry (6  sessions)

Thursdays, 4-5:30p ET | Oct 15-Nov 19

Leaders: Patricia Hagen & Tom Zelman

     The topic of Irish literature brings to mind the greats of the 19th century through the present: the four Nobel laureates (Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, Heaney) and Joyce, Edna O’Brien, and others. But storytelling and poetry have been intrinsic to Irish culture for more than a millennium. Irish poetry is the earliest vernacular poetry written in Europe. 

     After the interest in early Irish poets expressed at our free St. Patrick’s Day event earlier this year, we’d like to share more early works: brief poems (and prose poems) often akin to haiku in their economy and vividness. Many were written by monks and scribes in the margins of texts they were copying, and some written as stand-alone works on single pieces of parchment. We’ll begin with an excerpt from the Fionn mac Cumhail sagas, which sets a tone for the pieces that follow. We hope to have a lively discussion. Feel free to sip your favorite beverage as we engage in some lively craiç.

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Great Books, Great Readers: Job w/ Sacks commentary (24 sessions)

Thursdays, 8-9:30p ET | Oct 8-Dec 17

Leaders: Reynaldo Miranda-Zúñiga and Jason Happel

Join us for a close reading of one of the strangest and most argumentative, and perhaps philosophical, books in the Jewish and Christian traditions. The Book of Job is difficult in part because the Hebrew is odd, unique, and difficult to translate, which has led to opposing translations. For example, four Hebrew words in this book can be translated as "man"; Robert Sacks suggests that the difference among them points to the differences between a hero, a mortal, and a human being. The book is also difficult because it doesn’t resolve or man-’splain Job’s problems: he wants answers not consolation. He wants a hearing. Sacks makes the perplexities more obvious, allowing for hints of comedy. Our weekly conversations will focus on the primary text, supplemented by Sacks's notes. No Hebrew or prior study of the Bible is required, and this work can be a good introduction to both traditions. We read and discuss about 7 pages per week.

     This offering is part of an ongoing series that explores Jewish and Christian texts. Anyone who is interested in a pluralistic, serious (with some playfulness), conversational approach to religious texts, read for the purpose of personal understanding, is invited to join each quarter. We like to think we are contributing to interfaith dialogue by not adopting a theory of interfaith dialogue, but by just doing it.

     Text: Robert D. Sacks, The Book of Job: a New Translation with In-Depth Commentary. Published by Kafir Yaroq Books/Green Lion Press (2016).

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Homer, Odyssey (24 sessions)

Fridays, 10:00-11:30 am ET | Oct 9-Mar 19

Leaders: Jason Happel

If you've seen the movie and are curious what Homer wrote, this seminar offers an easy-going introduction to a work that begins a long tradition of philosophical story-telling. The book itself is a Trojan horse, full of surprises for those who go through the journey with Odysseus; and maybe we cannot really make sense of it until the end – upon returning, looking back, and re-telling the story as Odysseus did. In Symposium we often say that reading a summary of a great book or reading a "modernized" re-telling (for all of its value) is like hearing about a Beethoven symphony, rather than hearing it for yourself. This seminar is for first-time readers of Homer’s Odyssey, or those who were introduced to the story in high school or college, but without leisure to understand and enjoy the full scope of the genius of the epic. Slow reading is a meditative practice, not a quick acquisition. Many of the poem’s hints about domestic and married life are lost on young readers, but those themes have appealed to adults for 2500 years.

     We will read much of the Odyssey aloud, during weekly online sessions, allowing time to discover and discuss points that often go unnoticed and unenjoyed. Please participate even if you do not have time to read each week; our discussions will focus on the passages that we read aloud for about 15 minutes (usually the first 200-300 lines of each of its 24 books). 

Recommended translation:  the Odyssey, trans. Joe Sachs (Paul Dry Books, 2014) or Fitzgerald's translation. You may read any translation or translations you wish (and certainly listen to an audio version too!) but an unfamiliar translation can help us notice the “clues to delight.” Generally, we do not use resources outside of our text and conversation in order to invite greater participation and to avoid academic debates. However, if you are a teacher or would like to supplement our shared reading, Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments, Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad offers the reflections of someone who has spent a lifetime with Homer.

Tolstoy, War and Peace  (cont.)

Fridays, 3:00-4:30 pm ET | Oct 9-Dec 18

Leaders: Eric Stull and Linda McConnell

We have a Russian novel that begins in French and is about a war against the French. We have a novel that the author claimed wasn’t a novel at all. We have a 1460-page book with two nouns of seemingly equal weight in the title, to the first of which are devoted 1400 of its pages and to the other of which 60. We have a prose work filled with epic-style similes. What sort of book IS Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Presumably the sort that one has to read to find out. If such an answer is unsatisfactory, the manner of finding out may not be. One might suppose that the only way to get through a very long book is to read it as quickly as possible, especially if it is of the sort that can be read swiftly, as this incomparable novel can, written as it is by the hand of one whose storytelling even in translation is so limpid as to make us forget that we ourselves are not in the book. But what would be the point of just getting through the battle of Borodino, the burning of Moscow, the scenes of conversation, the swirl of dancing, the lives of Natasha, Prince Andrei, and the seemingly numberless others? If life is for the living, then a book is for the reading, which we will do at the slow-and-savor rate of about 40 pages a week.

     Text: any good translation (e.g., Dunnigan, Maude & Maude, Briggs, Pevear & Volokhonsky)