Slow Syllabus
Current Talks & Research
These are questions I’m actively researching, writing, and teaching through. I’m available to develop any of them as an invited lecture, seminar, workshop, or public conversation for universities, schools, cultural organizations, conferences, and other groups.
Artificial intelligence and being human
Toxic Offspring
Why Does AI Make Us Feel Powerful While Climate Change Makes Us Feel Guilty?
AI and climate change are two planetary-scale consequences of the same human traits: intelligence, ambition, industry, and the drive for more. So why does one make us lean forward while the other makes us want to look away, and what does that difference reveal about the stories we tell ourselves about being human?
The Shell and the Kernel
What Literature Knew About AI Before AI Existed
For more than a century, literature has been asking where meaning actually lives: hidden inside things, or created through relationships, contexts, and acts of attention. From Joseph Conrad to the Unix kernel to today’s neural networks, this talk follows one strange intellectual history and asks whether the machines we built have ended up confirming a theory of meaning that literature discovered first.
The Future Is Humanist
What Are the Humanities For in the Age of AI?
AI is driving the value of quick answers toward zero, exposing how much of higher education was already organized around summary, compliance, and polished output. This talk asks what becomes valuable when machines can produce the answers, and argues that the humanities should reclaim their deeper territory: judgment, attention, ethical reasoning, presence, meaning, and the lifelong work of becoming a person.
Fathers
Ten Bad Dads
What Literature Knows About Fatherhood
From Abraham raising the knife over Isaac to King Lear demanding that his daughters prove their love, literature is crowded with fathers who fail spectacularly. Why are bad fathers so much more memorable than good ones, and what might Abraham, Odysseus, Lear, Virginia Woolf’s Mr. Ramsay, and even Ned Stark teach us about the fathers we inherit, resist, and eventually risk becoming?
Good Fathers Are Bad
Why Your Children Need Something to Rebel Against
What if the job of a good father isn’t to make his children happy, but to fail them in the right ways? Moving from Freud and Winnicott through some of literature’s worst fathers, this talk asks whether children need parents who say no, create friction, survive being hated, and give them something solid enough to push against on the way to becoming themselves.
Education
The Conformity Paradox
Why Admissions Demands Individuality at the Exact Age Kids Want to Fit In
At precisely the age when adolescents are developmentally primed to monitor their peers, avoid standing out, and learn the codes of belonging, selective schools suddenly ask them to demonstrate uniqueness, authenticity, and a distinctive personal “spike.” Drawing on developmental psychology, the history of holistic admissions, and experience teaching students from middle school through graduate school, this talk asks what happens when the developmental imperative to fit in collides with an admissions system demanding that teenagers stand out.
What’s a Professor For?
Teaching After AI
If AI can explain the reading, summarize the lecture, and generate the essay, what is a professor actually for? This talk argues that the professor’s irreplaceable role is not delivering information but making possible the harder work of becoming: modeling judgment, intellectual risk, commitment, and what it looks like to build a life around ideas.
Heroes
Jesus and Achilles
Queer Men, Rival Heroes
Achilles makes strength, beauty, speed, and glory heroic; Jesus reverses the hierarchy, making the last first and greatness visible among the weak, poor, and despised. This talk reads them as rival, non-normative models of masculinity and asks why Western culture keeps returning to both.
Seminars and workshops
These come out of the courses published here, and run as a single visit, a short series, or a full multi-week seminar. A course can also be built to a program’s own subject.
Heartbreak & Happiness
90 minutes to a half day
The ten-week course in a single session. No advance reading.
Twenty Provocations
60 to 90 minutes, any group size
A writing and discussion workshop built on the card deck.
On Birth and Death
Single session or multi-week series
The sixteen-week course, full or abridged.
Who these are for
- Universities and collegesVisiting lectures, guest seminars, faculty development, first-year and common-reading programs.
- SchoolsTalks for students, parent programs, and faculty.
- Alumni and adult educationAlumni colleges, lifelong learning institutes, library systems, museums, and continuing education programs.
- Cultural organizations and conferencesKeynotes, workshops, and public conversations for literary festivals, education conferences, and humanities organizations.
Get in touch
If one of these ideas belongs in a conversation you’re organizing, get in touch. info@ultra-normal.com
About
Professor Neuman is Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School, where he teaches the seminars these sessions come from. He is the author of Fiction Beyond Secularism and co-author of Modernism and Its Environments, and writes on literature, mortality, and the purpose of higher education. He edits Slow Syllabus.