52 Texts Our Students Are Reading

Plus: Some films, speeches, and symphonies for ditching the heat.

You could spend four years slumped in the back of a lecture hall or half-focused on Zoom. Just another bored face or—worse—a black screen.

Why prepare for class if no one cares?

Why pose a question if you’re only ever met with glazed eyes and rote answers?

Why struggle to articulate your beliefs, when ChatGPT makes sharing the right ones so easy?

Unprepared, uncurious, and unprincipled. This is the norm, but are you happy with the norm?

We’re not, so we’re offering something better. At UATX, our freshmen pull all-nighters reading Dante and Hegel. They pose tough questions—in class, after class, over pizza, and with leading commentators. They organize student lectures on metamodernism and Allan Bloom. They write many of their essays by hand. And they read. A lot.

Our freshmen read so much this spring that we had to abbreviate this list. So here are just a few of the texts they’ve been confronting this term. Fifty-two, to be exact.

The (Partial) Spring Reading List:

Plus a few films, speeches, and symphonies.

• Analytical Tools for Politics and Economics, Prof. Scott Scheall

  • The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  • The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor, William Easterly

  • Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume

  • The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith

• Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Cryptocurrency, Prof. Thomas Hogan

  • Resistance Money: A Philosophical Case for Bitcoin, Andrew M. Bailey, Bradley Rettler, and Craig Warmke

  • Gradually, Then Suddenly, Parker A. Lewis

• Christianity and Islam, Europe and the East, sections taught by Professors Brandon Deadman, Isabella Reinhardt, Azadeh Vatanpour, Jacob Wolf, and Jonathan Yudelman

  • The New Testament: The King James Version

  • The Qur'an

  • Confessions, Saint Augustine

  • Incoherence of the Philosophers, Al-Ghazali

  • The Travels, Marco Polo

  • Orientalism, Edward Said

• Crown, Cathedral, and Crusade, Prof. Clay Greene

  • Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, Martin Lings

  • Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri

  • Beowulf

  • The Life of Charlemagne, Einhard

  • Proslogion, St. Anselm

• Discourses on Livy, Prof. Jonathan Yudelman

  • The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli

  • Discourses on Livy, Nicolo Machiavelli

  • Also recommended: Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli, Harvey Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, and Quentin Skinner’s Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction

• Foundations of Macroeconomics I, Prof. Thomas Hogan

  • Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

• Historiography and the Philosophy of History, Prof. Brandon Deadman and Visiting Prof. and UATX co-founder Niall Ferguson

  • The Histories, Polybius

  • The Annals, Tacitus

  • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

  • “Second Draft (1830): The Philosophical History of the World,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, G. W. F. Hegel

  • War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

• Intellectual Foundations of Economics, sections taught by Professors Thomas Hogan and Scott Scheall

  • A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell

  • First Alcibiades, Plato

  • An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus

  • Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill

  • “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

  • “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” Friedrich Engels

  • State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin

  • “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” Ludwig von Mises

• Special Topics in Film: Facing the Mad Soul: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski, Prof. Alex Priou

  • Agricola and Germany, Tacitus

  • Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog

  • Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

  • Plus the films: “Aguirre,” “Fitzcarraldo,” “Burden of Dreams,” “My Best Enemy,” and “Grizzly Man”

• Special Topics: Writing & Speaking, Visiting Prof. Michael Lind

  • “Gettysburg Address” (Reenactment), Abraham Lincoln

  • Address to Congress after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt

  • Address to Congress in World War II, Winston Churchill

  • “Ich Bin Ein Berliner,” John F. Kennedy

  • “Tear Down This Wall,” Ronald Reagan

• The Sublime and The Beautiful II: Modern and Contemporary, Prof. Clay Greene

  • A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke

  • Haikus, Basho

  • Beauty: A Very Short Introduction, Roger Scruton

  • Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant

  • Plus: Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (Last Movement), Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Last Movement), and “Tokyo Story” (1953)

• Work, Leisure, and the Good Life, Prof. Jonathan Yudelman

  • Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford

  • Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper

  • Politics, Aristotle

  • The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

  • “An Apology for Idlers,” Robert Louis Stevenson

• Writing and the English Language, Prof. Boris Fishman

  • The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, John Gardner

  • Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English, Patricia T. O’Conner

  • Tristram Shandy, Laurence Stern

  • Middlemarch, George Eliot

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How did the great humanists learn Latin and Greek?

UATX's Center for Education and Public Service is proud to host the Teaching Through Immersion Conference in Austin, Texas this July 7–11. We're inviting K-12 classical educators to explore the immersive, spoken-language methods used by Renaissance scholars like Erasmus, Comenius, and Thomas More. Bring the classical languages to life with us!

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