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 online, once a week, for two hours, over an eight-week term. Sections hold about twenty-five learners.
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 on video. There are no lectures, no tests, and no PowerPoint. Grades are recorded, but they are not the point.
Planned examples from a catalog of about thirty courses; no instructors have been appointed.
The Republic across an eight-week term, 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: an individually advised essay of 12,000–18,000 words on a topic of the student's own framing, written across more than one term. Open to applicants by petition.
We do not have majors. We have a catalog of about thirty courses, organized loosely by discipline. Once instructors are appointed, a faculty advisor will help you build a coherent path through them.
Courses will run online, in eight-week terms. What a full course of study here would correspond to in degree terms is, today, a question we cannot fully answer — and we will not pretend otherwise.
Eight weeks. Dates to be announced.
Eight weeks. Dates to be announced.
The first two terms will run ten sections of about twenty-five learners each.
Planned public lectures, open to the wider community at no cost. Dates to be announced.
Classes have not started; registration is open for Fall 2028. Join the interest list and tell us which seminars you would most like to take, and why. We will read carefully.