The Core Seminar in Political and Social Thought has a syllabus that varies year to year, as do various independent studies associated with the program. The goal of Core Seminar is to provide students with the highest level of intellectual capacity in reading, interpreting, writing, and arguing about social and political theory. By the time they finish their third year seminar, students possess the capacity to read widely in the world of the humanities and social sciences, with a level of depth and attention more often found in graduate education. They bring these capacities to new theoretical traditions they encounter outside of core seminar, which they engage as part of writing their fourth year thesis.

Core Seminar II (Spring 2025)

Core Seminar I (Fall 2024)

Core Seminar II (Spring 2024)

Core Seminar I (Fall 2023)

Freedom and Flourishing in Political and Social Thought (Spring 2024)

Response Papers

In core seminar, students write a weekly response paper of 500 words (sometimes 500-1000 words). In so doing, they both train themselves to absorb difficult material and write about it on a weekly basis, and also enhance their experience of intellectual freedom, arguing in manifestly different ways about the same text, as the following (anonymized) response papers show: