St. John's College

St. John's College is a small liberal arts college with campuses in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since 1937 every undergraduate has followed the same four-year, all-required curriculum (the "Program"), with no majors, no lectures as the main mode of teaching, and no textbooks: students read primary works in roughly chronological order and discuss them in classes of about fifteen to twenty led by tutors. The seminar, which meets twice a week in the evening for all four years, is the heart of the Program; it is supported by tutorials in language (Greek, then French), mathematics, and music, and by a laboratory sequence in the natural sciences. The list below is the seminar reading list only, in the order the books are read during the 2025-26 academic year on the Annapolis campus. Freshman year is devoted to the Greeks; sophomore year moves from the Bible and Rome through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; junior year covers the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; senior year the nineteenth and twentieth. Tutorial and laboratory readings (Euclid, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and the like) are omitted, as are the elective preceptorial readings of the junior and senior fall. The Santa Fe seminar list differs in a few places (for example Santa Fe sophomores read Maimonides and freshmen read Prometheus Bound).