Hello. My name is Alan Jacobs. I am Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program at Baylor University, and a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.
My new book (well, you know, “my” book) is a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s 1955 collection of poems The Shield of Achilles. You may order it at the Princeton University Press website or at Amazon.
My next book, appearing in 2025, will be Paradise Lost: A Biography — an entry in this series.
My previous book is called Breaking Bread with the Dead. You may get a brief preview of it by reading this excerpt.
Before that: The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis.
Before that: How to Think.
You can find a mostly-complete list of my books here. You can also look at a PDF of my CV.
If you would like to invite me to speak, first of all Thank you, but I am no longer doing public speaking, for reasons I explain here.
About social media: I don’t do the common platforms, but I have a blog and I'm on micro.blog. If you want to see pretty much everything I post online, you may subscribe to a weekly digest of my micro.blog posts — I link there to everything I post elsewhere (at least, when I remember).
Here are some essays I’ve published in the past few years:
If you are a student of mine, here are some pages for you to look at:
- My FAQ on general policies
- A page on grades and grading
- A page explaining why I don't use Canvas (and other related technologies)
Here are a few other online places where you can find my writing:
