Multi-Day Seminars

Taught by experts in their field, our multi-day seminars allow students the opportunity to have intensive and fruitful academic engagement with topics and thinkers often neglected in their Yale classrooms. Through these multi-day seminars, the Buckley Institute helps fill the gaps in the Yale curriculum.

Details

In March 2015, we launched our multi-day seminar program, allowing students the opportunity to have intensive and fruitful academic engagement with topics and thinkers neglected in their Yale classrooms. Held over three days during winter, spring, summer, and fall breaks, topics and professors have included:

Past Topics

  • Lincoln and the Crisis of American Democracy with Peter Ahrensdorf
  • The Federalist Papers and the American Founding with Charles Kesler
  • Tocqueville's Democracy in America with Patrick Deneen
  • Transcendentalism and the Roots of American Individualism with Ryan Hanley
  • C.S. Lewis and the Future of Being Human with Michael Dauphinais

Upcoming Seminars

The Buckley Institute is currently accepting applications for our spring break seminar, “How the Declaration Made America: Relic, Symbol, and Object,” with the Hoover Institution’s Michael Auslin from Wednesday, March 18, to Friday, March 20.

All Yale undergraduates and graduate students are invited to apply. Applications are due by February 13, 2026.

If you have any questions, reach out to moe@buckleyinstitute.com

“This seminar changed my view of myself and the way I believe I should be interacting with the world. I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity to engage with the Transcendentalists as it has allowed me to reevaluate the way I think I ought to spend my time and take a closer look at my relationship with my fellow man and Nature. I’ll be chewing on these ideas for a long time.”

— Tori Cook ’27

“This was a wonderful experience. We all truly came in there with no prior knowledge and all left with our minds and lives changed. The professor was brilliant. The people were brilliant. The conversations we had were just truly fantastic. Thank you so much for making this seminar possible.” – Abhinay Lingareddy ’26

— Abhinay Lingareddy ’26

“It was a broad and ambitious seminar and I felt like it lived up to the hype I was excited for.”

— Lizzie Steeves ’27

“I am seriously impressed at the quality of this seminar, both in the resources the Buckley Institute offered and the effort put in both by the staff and the professor. The topic was incredibly fascinating, my fellow seminar attendees were invested and eager—I am absolutely thrilled with how I decided to spend my break.”

— Noah Torrance ’28

Past Multi-Day Seminars

Join Skidmore College’s Flagg Taylor for a three-day seminar reflecting on the writings of two of the great authors of the twentieth century: Arthur Koestler and Václav Havel.