Yale Directed Studies

Directed Studies is a selective one-year program for about 125 first-year students at Yale College, founded in 1946. Students take three linked year-long courses, Literature, Philosophy, and Historical and Political Thought, which together make up two-thirds of their first-year schedule. Each course combines a weekly lecture by a Yale faculty member with small discussion sections of about eighteen students, and students write a paper roughly every two weeks. The fall semester in all three courses runs from the ancient Near East and Greece through late antiquity and the Middle Ages; the spring semester runs from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. The lists below follow the schedules of readings in the three official syllabi, fall then spring, with the assigned selections given in the note. Anthologies and readers on the book list (Early Greek Philosophy, The Stoics Reader, Classical Arabic Philosophy, the Romantic poetry reader) are entered by the works actually assigned from them where the syllabus names them.