Neponset is built around the seminar: small, sustained conversations among readers, led by a faculty member, anchored in a body of texts. There are no lectures. There is reading, writing, and argument — week after week, with people who care about getting it right.
A Neponset seminar meets once a week, for two hours, over a fourteen-week term. Class sizes are capped at sixteen so that everyone speaks every session.
Each seminar carries a substantial reading load — typically one book or 80–120 pages per week — and a written component, either a short response paper, a longer term essay, or both, depending on the seminar.
Seminars meet in person where possible, and on video where it is not. There are no lectures, no tests, and no PowerPoint. Grades are recorded, but they are not the point.
The Republic at one book per week, with attention to the dialogue's structure and what it asks of its reader. Texts: Plato, Bloom translation; secondary readings from Strauss, Annas, Reeve.
The Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers, the Declaration, and the Constitution, read alongside the contemporaneous letters and pamphlets that argued over them. Heavy reading; heavier discussion.
One novel, one term. We will read George Eliot's masterpiece slowly enough to notice what she is doing, and write our own essays back to her about it.
An introductory seminar in mathematical reasoning: induction, contradiction, construction, and the moral imagination of the proof. Some calculation, mostly thinking. No prerequisites beyond high-school algebra.
What money is, how debt structures public life, and what it means for a society to take its obligations seriously. Smith, Keynes, Graeber, contemporary critics.
Augustine read as the founder of a literary form. We will spend the term inside one book and the questions it asks about memory, sin, and the self.
From Polybius to Madison to Arendt, with a coda on contemporary American political theory. The seminar's question is its title.
Darwin's argument as written, before the textbook compressions. We will pay close attention to what he is and is not claiming, and to how a careful book makes a careful argument.
A workshop in essayistic writing — Montaigne, Hazlitt, Baldwin, Didion, Robinson — combined with our own attempts at the form. Submissions weekly.
A term spent inside the keyboard works, the cantatas, and the Mass in B minor. No technical background required; close listening required.
For continuing students: a year-long, individually advised essay of 12,000–18,000 words on a topic of the student's own framing. Open to applicants by petition.
We do not have majors. We have a list of seminars, organized loosely by discipline, and a faculty advisor who helps you build a coherent path through them.
Students who continue through a full course of study at Neponset complete somewhere between twenty-four and thirty seminars, write a senior essay, and sit for a final oral examination. What that course of study would correspond to in degree terms is, today, a question we cannot fully answer — and we will not pretend otherwise.
Inaugural term. Seminars begin February 2, 2026 and conclude May 15, 2026. Applications accepted on a rolling basis.
Tentative dates: September 14, 2026 through December 18, 2026. Course list published in June.
Two-week breaks in late March and late October. No classes meet; faculty hold optional reading-group sessions.
Public lectures, twice per term. Open to the wider community at no cost. Schedule announced one month in advance.
Begin an application. Tell us in your statement which seminars you would most like to enter, and why. We will read carefully.