What would you do if faced with the ultimate sacrifice? God’s command to Abraham that he offer his son, Isaac, has been seen as both the utmost example of self-sacrifice and an argument for the necessity of disobeying commands that are morally abhorrent. For more than two millennia, people throughout the world have grappled with the troubling questions about sacrifice, authority, obedience, and faith to which the story gives rise. The notion of the ultimate sacrifice of one’s children has been played out from Agamemnon and Iphigenia to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Does our thinking about such sacrifices depend on whose vantage point we choose to center in the narrative? Or is it simply a question of ethics?  Explore how the theme of sacrifice has been taken up, both directly and indirectly, in different literary, poetic, artistic, and musical imaginations across time. 

Readings will include literature selections from Euripides, Kierkegaard, and more. We will also delve into art and music by Rembrandt, Chagall, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen.

Dates Wednesday at 8:00pm Eastern: September 29 – November 3
Time: 6 Weeks of 75 Minutes
Tuition: $325

Dr. Steven Volk, Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin College will guide this fun intellectual journey. A professor of Latin American history and museum studies for 31 years,  he was also named US Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Classical Explorations: Hemingway

Explore the works of Ernest Hemingway with your peers. Explore the role of modernism, the natural world, war, race, and gender in Hemingway's enduring works, led by experts.

Dates Tuesdays at 8:00pm Eastern: October 26 – November 30
Time: 6 Weeks of 90 Minutes
Tuition: $350

Sessions In Progress

Classical Explorations: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Live from Dublin, explore The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde’s Classic tale of Gothic horror. Join renowned actors, playwrights, and educators Michael and Sam Ford as they guide you through the text. This duo will lead the weekly discussion on sections of the novel as only true Dubliners can. Michael will provide bonus content around the wit and wisdom of Oscar Wilde. Sam will utilize his knowledge as a historian and urbanist to show us Dublin and London in Wilde’s time. Join us for this exciting literary adventure!

Dates: Tuesdays at 8:00pm Eastern: September 14 – October 19
Time: 6 Weeks of 90 Minutes
Tuition: $325

Your Favorite Literary Tour Guides are Back!

We are excited to share that Sam and Michael Ford are returning to Great Books for another intellectually rousing discussion series live from Dublin. 

Sam is a writer, performer, teacher, and tour guide with a passion for Dublin history. He is an Irish Literature Scholar and Enthusiast with a QQI Level 6 Special Award in Tour Guiding from Coláiste Dhúlaigh.

Michael is an actor known for his roles in Becoming Jane, Michael Collins, and Frank. He was artistic director of Bewley’s Café Theatre in Dublin from 1999 to 2005 and has worked on more than 50 RTE radio dramas.

Join us with a pint of Guinness (or cup of tea), for this exciting literary adventure! 

Connect with Readers & Thinkers from Across the Globe.

Live, weekly classes put you in touch with the best thinking and writing from throughout history. 

Small-group seminars and workshops cultivate intellectual community and build meaningful connections among peers.

Enjoy Programs that Challenge and Enrich. Learn Alongside World-Class Faculty. 

All classes are led by our distinguished faculty of Academic Directors. These skilled professors and scholars hail from world-class institutions across the globe. Masters of Socratic pedagogy known as Shared Inquiry, they have been inspiring a love of literature in our students for nearly 20 years.

Join us for shared inquiry sessions that provide the exciting, literary exploration. Call/text us at 203-612-9470 to register today!

2021 Past Sessions for Adults

Shared Inquiry Discussion: Hemingway Explored 

Tuesday, August 10 at 8PM Eastern
Led by Dr. Joseph Coulson

Event Description - Explore the classic short stories, Indian Camp and The End of Something, in a Shared Inquiry discussion with your Great Books friends and peers, led by Dr. Joseph Coulson. This a great way to sample a Shared Inquiry discussion with peers.

Dr. Coulson is the President and Chief Academic Officer of Harrison Middleton University. He is the past president of the Great Books Foundation, our mission partner. Beyond teaching, his poetry, drama, and fiction have been widely published, including two novels, Of Song and Water and The Vanishing Moon, that was also translated into German and French. Joe studied at Wayne State University and the University of Oxford, and he holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo. He is a long-time Great Books Academic Director. 

Inside the Mind of Hemingway

Wednesday, July 14 at 8PM Eastern

Led by Dr. Mark Ott

Event Description - Dr. Mark Ott is a Hemingway expert in every way possible. Explore the role of modernism, the natural world, war, race, and gender in Hemingway's most enduring works.

Dr. Ott is a Great Books Academic Director and the author of A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream, A Contextual Biography, co-editor of Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory: New Perspectives, and Hemingway in Italy: Twenty-First Century Perspectives.

He is the editor of the "Teaching Ernest Hemingway" series for Kent State University Press, and was the co-director of the XVI Biennial Ernest Hemingway Society Conference in Venice in 2014. He has contributed to Imagining Spain: Hemingway and the Spanish World, Ernest Hemingway in Context, Hemingway and the Black Renaissance, Ernest Hemingway in Key West, and has been published in The Hemingway Review. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He is the Headmaster of the Windsor School at Albany in The Bahamas. He has previously served as chair of the English Department at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. 

Classical Explorations - April 2021

Is Absalom, Absalom! the greatest American novel?  Faulkner thought it might be.  The Nobel Prize Committee weighed it along with The Sound and the Fury and awarded him the Prize for Literature.  The literary world came ablaze in the 1930s as Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind caught American imagination and awakened the world’s curiosity about the South. 

Dive into this great American classic with us!  Travel back in time to William Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, before, during, and after the Civil War.  Unravel the tangled  memories of its residents to explore the South’s relationship to its own history in Absalom, Absalom!.  Multiple narrators jumping through time add layers of richness to this fascinating tale of a quest for power and position.  Absalom, Absalom! is a powerful exploration of human passions, family, power, race, social hierarchy, and the South. 

This series will be led by longtime Great Books Academic Directors Noah Rosenblum, JD.

Noah Rosenblum earned his JD from Yale Law School and is pursuing his Ph.D. in intellectual history at Columbia University. Noah is the recipient of a Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education, a Seigel Fellowship from the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, and is a former Yale Law School Legal History Fellow. He is a graduate of Harvard and Deep Springs College.

Call 203-612-9470 or Register Online Today! 

GBO Seminar & Discussion Series 

As Herman Melville writes in Moby-Dick, There is a "sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath.”

Sweet Mysteries of the Deep: Water and the Sea of our Imagining will probe the depths of literature by exploring what water has historically signified to the human imagination. And we will consider how writers have made use of water and sea in their work—as a battleground, as an abyss, and as an historical archive. Text selections will include works by William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Derek Walcott, Hector Tobar, and others!

This series will be co-led by longtime Great Books Academic Directors Dr. Amos Rothschild and Max Suechting. 

Dr. Amos Rothchild is the Associate Professor of English at St. Thomas Aquinas College. He is a graduate of Yale University, Fordham University, and Boston University.

Max Suechting is a doctoral candidate in Stanford University’s Program in Modern Thought & Literature. He is a graduate of Amherst College.

GBO Classical Explorations - Feb. 23

Dubliners: Live from Dublin and led by a native Dubliner! Join us to read and discuss James Joyce's timeless work in this six week program. Explore the most famous and iconic stories of Dublin and meet the bars, theatres, and streets that make these stories come alive.  Students will be expected to read an approximately 30-page section of the novel for each class meeting and prepare a minimum of two discussion questions.

Led by Academic Director Sam Ford, a performer, teacher, scholar of Irish literature, native Dubliner, and ultimate tour guide to Irish culture.

Classical Explorations Quick Facts:

GBO Seminar Series

Join us for a six-week investigation into When Dreams Become Reality. Explore how imagination and dreams help shape how we see the world and give voice to what we might try to do within it. Our shared inquiry methodology enables you to simply show up, read expertly-chosen selections of literature together, and learn deeply through Socratic-style discussion. Readings include works by Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Jorge Luis Borges, and others.

Led by Dr. Ilan Stavans and Noah Rosenblum, JD.  Read more about these longtime Great Books Academic Directors below.

GBO Seminar Series Quick Facts:

Sam Ford will lead the Classic Explorations: The Dubliners on Feb. 23.

Sam Ford

Sam Ford is a writer, performer, and teacher with a passion for Dublin literature, history, and culture.  A native Dubliner, he received his MSc in Urban Studies from University College London and his BA from Trinity College Dublin.  The ultimate tour guide to Dubin, Sam has worked with severl great Dublin institutions including the James Joyce Centre and International Literature Festival Dublin.  He has performed at the Abbey, the Peacock, the Samuel Beckett, and several other prominent Irish theaters.

Jonathan Volk will lead the Writer's Workshop this spring.

Jonathan Volk

Jonathan Volk received his MFA at the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets & Writers, where he also teaches creative writing. He has work published in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Caketrain and elsewhere. His honors include the Harvey Swados Prize in Fiction and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize

Dr. Ilan Stavans

Dr. Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Cultures at Amherst College, host of NPR’s In Contrast, and publisher of Restless Books, devoted to world literature in translation. Celebrated by the The New York Times as one of the foremost authorities on Latino literature and culture, Dr. Stavans is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Guggenheim Fellowship. His work, translated into a dozen languages, has been adapted into stage and film.

Noah Rosenblum JD

Noah Rosenblum earned his JD from Yale Law School and is pursuing his Ph.D. in intellectual history at Columbia University. Noah is the recipient of a Javits Fellowship from the US Department of Education, a Seigel Fellowship from the Consortium for Intellectual and Cultural History, and is a former Yale Law School Legal History Fellow. He is a graduate of Harvard and Deep Springs College.

Share With Friends

Everything is better when shared. Please spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and fellow booklovers, and register today! 

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