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In 1994, classics scholar Richard Garner, PhD, came to Adelphi from Yale University with a mission: to take Adelphi's small honors program and, as founding dean, turn it into a full-fledged Honors College.
It has been 30 years since Richard Garner was named Dean of Adelphi University’s Honors College and five years since Susan Dinan assumed the reins and began leading the college.
Under their leadership, a dynamic community committed to the life of the mind and an education of depth and breadth, where students learn to read, write and think across disciplines has grown. Fundamental to the Honors College is motto Sapere Aude, our commitment to dare to know. Please join us this year to read, reflect, and celebrate!
Launched in the fall of 1994, the Adelphi University Honors College is now celebrating three decades of excellence in education. As part of that celebration, we spoke with the founding dean, Richard Garner, PhD, and the current dean, Susan Dinan, PhD, about the College and how it has evolved over the years.
Celebrate 30 Years of Adelphi’s Honors College by reading 30 Texts in 2025!
In this compelling work, People of the Book, Brooks examines the history of the important Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain and the work of a modern rare book expert.
Read the New York Times review for more on this captivating book.
In this groundbreaking book, Kuhn explores the history of science and the nature of scientific progress. His ideas about research and the expectations we have for disciplinary change will challenge and expand our understanding of how science evolves.
Zhang is one for few social commentators who writes in English for an international audience. Her articles on China’s social, cultural, and political climate have been published widely, including in the New York Times and The Guardian.
This sharp and witty comedy unfolds in an Iranian classroom where adult English learners prepare for their proficiency exam. As they navigate a linguistic playground, their wildly different dreams, frustrations, and secrets come to light. Can they overcome the limits of language to discover what they truly want to say?
Read the New York Times review for more insight into this celebrated play.
This timeless Persian allegory takes readers on a mystical journey with a group of birds seeking enlightenment under the guidance of their leader, the hoopoe. Through poetic storytelling, it explores universal themes of self-discovery, spiritual growth, and the pursuit of truth.
Take this opportunity to engage with one of the most celebrated works of Sufi literature, now integral to our shared academic exploration of the human condition.
Hochschild poses a critical question: How do two-earner households manage wage work, kinwork, and housework? Are things truly equal? This influential book introduced the term “second shift” to describe the challenges faced by working women balancing careers and domestic responsibilities.
The Shahnameh, or The Book of Kings is the longest poem written by a single poet, tracing Persian collective memory from its mythic origins through the Arab Conquest of the 7th century. From Rostam’s heroics to the tragic love of Bijan and Manijeh, Persian-speaking people of all ages across the Middle East and South Asia can recite lines from it by heart to this day.
In this compelling work, Hamnet, O’Farrell examines the life and tragic death of Shakespeare’s son, exploring the profound impact of loss on a family. The novel weaves together themes of grief, love, and the bonds between parent and child.
In this compelling work, Moby Dick, Melville examines obsession, fate, and the human spirit through the tale of Captain Ahab’s relentless pursuit of the great white whale.
In this compelling work, Othello, Shakespeare examines themes of jealousy, betrayal, and race through the tragic story of Othello and his deceitful ensign, Iago.
In this inventive and satirical work, Machado de Assis presents the reflections of Brás Cubas, a recently deceased man, who recounts his life with wit, irony and philosophical insight.
Read the New York Times review for more on this groundbreaking book.
In Leaves of Grass, Whitman celebrates the human spirit, nature, and democracy through an innovative and expansive poetic style that reshaped American literature.
In this powerful oral history, Studs Terkel brings to life the voices of everyday Americans, offering a candid and heartfelt look at their work, struggles, and aspirations.
Join our incoming first-year students in their Honors College Orientation reading! Examining Critic Becca Rothfeld has called this memoir “a hybrid beast, a remarkably erudite work of history, criticism and philosophy.” Among her considerations, O’Gieblyn tackles the role of subjective experience in scientific inquiry, the implications of transhumanism, and the consequences of disenchantment, one of the many legacies of the Enlightenment.
Which organizations, projects, and activities will you pursue during this academic year? Do you really need to join a club? To discover one sociologist’s answer to this question, join Dean Rudolph in reading excerpts from Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which we discuss at the Honors College for a special teatime Dean’s Circle. This “instant classic” of social science has been foundational to our considerations of the role of associational life in American political culture.
In conjunction with Professor Robert Bradley’s Farewell Lecture, “A Collegial Calculus Caper,” on September 17, we invite you to read G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. Professor Bradley has been a key contributor to Honors College coursework, and has advised numerous Honors College senior theses, and we will miss him! Hardy, in his readable apologia, seeks to explain mathematical beauty to a new generation and to support the study of “math for math’s sake”.Â
This week, Honors College students will join Dean Craig Carson in attending Bedlam Theater Company’s production of Jane Austen’s classic romantic novel, Pride and Prejudice. We invite you to read along with the original! And then, for those of you not able to attend the play, watch one of the fine film adaptations!
Are you familiar with Foreign Affairs? Published by the Council on Foreign Relations, it is one of the world’s most influential foreign-policy magazines. Bipartisan contributors include diplomats, public officials, policymakers, political scientists and other scholarly experts writing short, but cogent, pieces addressing the most pressing policy issues of our time. To prepare for this week’s Multidisciplinary Thinking Panel, focused on , we invite you to read two recent Foreign Affairs articles, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr.’s “The End of the Long American Century: Trump and the Sources of U.S. Power” and “The Broken Economic Order: How to Rewire the International System in the Age of Trump”, by economist Mariana Mazzucato.
On the heels of a special Honors College’s Thirtieth Anniversary event, an Alumni Dean’s Circle hosted by Dr. Craig Carson, join our honors alumni in reading Richard Powers’s Playground, an “enchanting” novel about “the wonders of the ocean and the terrors of A.I”, in the words of New York Times critic Alexandra Jacobs.
Take advantage of the long weekend to delve into Oxford scholar Pekka Hämäläinen’s provocative history of Native nations’ attempts to challenge European-American colonization. Hämäläinen, a Bancroft Prize winner, synthesizes a broad swath of scholarship about and by Native Americans, in this account of centuries of conflict.
Born in part of Irish playwright Beckett’s experience as a Resister during World War II, Waiting for Godot has become famous for its minimalism, its existentialism, and its absurdism. Beckett refused naturalism and mimesis in his work, opting instead to observe, “It’s a game, everything is a game… it’s a game in order to survive.” This week, the Honors College will see Waiting for Godot on Broadway; read along with us (or watch the play online)!
Just in time for Halloween, with its emphasis on disguised identity, comes our reading recommendation for this week: Viet Thanh Nugyen’s The Sympathizer, which begins, “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” In the New York Times, London correspondent Sarah Lyall explained, “His novel is a spy thriller, a philosophical exploration, a coming-of-age tale, the story of what it’s like to be an immigrant, to be part-Asian, to be the illegitimate child of a forbidden liaison. It’s about being forced to hide yourself under so many layers that you’re not sure who you are.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur “Genius Grant”, Nguyen is also a professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California; during Registration this week, consider adding an elective in one of these areas for your Fall semester!
Registration for Spring 2026 begins and Halloween during this week.
Written in 1998 and set in 2032, this sequel to much-heralded Parable of the Sower won the Nebula Award for Best Novel. In the face of constant change and even chaos, how do we create stable meaning? What roles can religion, narrative, and care ethics play in this process? Butler observed, “Parable of the Sower was a book about problems. I originally intended that Parable of the Talents be a book about solutions. I don’t have the solutions, so what I’ve done here is looked at the solutions that people tend to reach for when they’re feeling troubled and confused.” What problems and solutions are foremost for you as we head to the ballot box this week? (Don’t forget to vote! Local elections are more important than you think!)
The Honors College heads to see the Philharmonic perform the week of Stravinsky later this week, accompanied by our very own Professor Benjamin Serby. Have you read Professor Serby’s scholarly work? As our seniors sign up for their February thesis progress presentations, we focus on Faculty and Student Scholarship this week and highlight this recent article of Professor Serby’s from the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
World epics are a prominent feature of our Human Condition great books curriculum. Curious what the sophomores and juniors are reading? Wondering what updates the Honors College has made to the Human Condition syllabus since your days as a student? Check out The Tale of the Heike; like The Iliad, it too originated sung poetry recounting tales of warriors and warfare, in this case a late 12th-century power struggle between the Taira (Heike) and Minamoto (Genji) houses. Sharing epic poetry’s focus on courage, glory, duty, and fate, The Tale of the Heike exists in several English translations. We recommend Royall Tyler’s translations for Penguin Classics. During this week, you might also consider how to have an epic experience of the world during International Education Week. Attend one or more global events this week!
Wonder where your apple pie filling really comes from? Take advantage of your turkey coma to lie down and read Raj Patel’s excellent Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. Why are rates of both hunger and obesity skyrocketing, and how can we understand the choices that have led to the contradictory state of affairs? Even more important, what can we do about it? Read Patel to learn how we can act to improve sustenance at home and around the world.
The love, passion, and art that characterized the life of the bohemians recounted in Puccini’s La Bohème, which we will see this week at the Metropolitan Opera, also inspired Adelphi alumnus Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Larson’s tale is a direct descendant of La Bohème, but so too, in its way, is rocker Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, her account of starting out in Manhattan during the 1960s and 1970s as a poet and a singer, arriving with a suitcase and a copy of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Smith’s desire to live the life of a poet-artist, a life of non-conformity, led her to Robert Mapplethorpe, the Floral Park-born photographer who would become her best friend, confidant and collaborator. Winner of the National Book Award, Just Kids tells their story of these – in the words of the New York Times, “bohemian soul mates”… with Mapplethorpe in the role of Mimi?
Take a quick break before Final Exams kick off to – at least begin – reading Kaveh Aktar’s widely celebrated debut novel, Martyr! Inspired by Annie Dillard, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, among others, Iranian-American poet Aktar has written a wholly original novel that tackles timeless themes of metaphysics, spirituality and ethics. As the novel’s young hero, Cyrus, makes a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Museum – currently celebrating its 200th anniversary – we recommend that you do the same. The anniversary exhibition, “Breaking the Mold: Brooklyn Museum at 200”, is on display until February 2026, so check it out this cultural event over Winter Break!
In tribute to 30 years of academic excellence, the Honors College is embracing 30 texts that reflect the depth and breadth of our intellectual community. Fifteen texts will enrich the spring semester, while the next 15 will follow in the fall, creating a year-long celebration of ideas and discussion.
Miss the stimulating debates of the Dean’s Circle? Reignite that spirit at events like our special Dean’s Circle conversation during Spirit Weekend on Saturday, October 4. Explore thought-provoking works, register and attend enriching cultural events, and engage with fellow Honors College alumni and students.
During the week of February 3-7 our seniors will present their research at the Honors College Thesis Works-in-Progress Colloquium, which will be held in the Innovation Center. Multiple sessions will be held each day affording every student the opportunity to share their research findings with the Honors community. Currently students are required to attend a few sessions, and we welcome everyone to join us.
