About Slow Syllabus

Most free courses online are made for platforms. They are chopped into videos, gated behind sign-ups, padded toward a certificate, and stripped of the one thing that makes a course a course: an argument about what to read, in what order, and why.

Slow Syllabus publishes the other thing. Real courses, taught at a real college, handed over whole. The framing essays are the ones students get. The reading lists are the ones students are assigned. The questions at the end of each week are the questions asked in the room.

Slow, because that is the pace the material wants. Sixteen weeks on death is not a productivity hack. There are no streaks here, no progress bars, no notifications asking where you have been. You take a week when you have a week.

What it costs

Nothing. Every core reading links to a public domain text, an open archive, or a freely available recording. Books you might want to own link to Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores and pays a small commission back here. That commission is the whole business model.

Who made it

Justin Neuman is Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School, where he has taught for years in a seminar room with fifteen chairs around a table. He is the author of Fiction Beyond Secularism and co-author of Modernism and Its Environments. Slow Syllabus is published by Ultra-Normal LLC.

Using these courses

Teachers, hospice trainers, book clubs, reading groups, chaplains, and death doulas are welcome to assign, adapt, and reproduce this material with attribution. If you are building a program around one of these courses, write and say so.