Courses

Each session will include some relevant background, but our discussions will be guided by the interests of participants. Likely topics will include desire, the crushing weight of history, what we want from pleasure, the meaning of devotion in the absence of faith, art, loss, the uses of fantasy, and what it’s like to be a human being with a fragile, needy body.

This course explores Gabriel García Márquez’s seventh novel—his self-proclaimed masterpiece and his only work devoted entirely to love. Moving away from magical realism and solitude, this novel is a grounded meditation on the many dimensions of love: romantic, platonic, and mature traced across decades of longing, separation, and reunion.

Trek through the Joycean high country with Rosenbach Joyce Sherpa Mike Barsanti as he leads an intrepid group of readers through a truly unique work of literature. Designed for first-time readers, the course will help students find a method for reading (and re-reading!) the “Wake,” while benefiting from the shared experiences of the group. There are nine course sessions from October to June.

Few literary friendships are as consequential as the one between Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. In this five-session course, Jack Lynch and Celia Barnes will guide participants through close readings and lively discussion of fascinating intertwined texts.  

In this seminar, we’ll go beyond the best and worst of times and examine the wisdom/foolishness, belief/incredulity, Light/Darkness, hope/despair, etc. in a story that attempts to encapsulate a cataclysmic historical event, told by an author at the top of his abilities who had also just turned his life upside down with a series of personal decisions: abandonment of his wife; a young secret mistress; shuttering of his long-running magazine; start of a new magazine; and his first public reading tour. In effect, Dickens himself was leading a kind of small-r revolution against himself at the time he was writing about Revolution. 

Celebrate National Coming Out Day 2026 at the Rosenbach, as we find inspiration for sensual Queer self-expression in the papers of lesbian playwright Mercedes de Acosta (1892-1968). Participants will leave the Rosenbach with a copy of an Acosta love poem, their own poetry, as well as a lavender pen to continue exploring and expressing Queer identity following the course.  

In this course, we’ll consider how Dracula highlights the fears and anxieties of the culture that produced it and discover how this vampire story, and its themes of otherness, race and ethnicity, and sexuality and gender, is still relevant for contemporary readers. 

Chaucer wrote his poetry to be read aloud, and the Wife of Bath is the loudest, and most famous, of his Canterbury pilgrims. We will also consider those tales that immediately follow the Wife in the Canterbury Tales sequence: those of the Friar and Summoner. But the Wife is the main event.

Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy and possibly his first published play. It is certainly his bloodiest and is perhaps the most disturbing of all his texts, seeming to some playgoers to be more like an early modern version of a Quentin Tarantino movie than what they normally associate with Shakespeare.

On the Road is both a modern epic of male escape from domesticity, peddling a fantasy of mobility as freedom (often at the expense of those left behind), and a disarmingly authentic search for meaning and spirituality in a fallen postwar world of conformity, capitalism, and prescribed sexual norms. In this course, we will try to come to terms with the novel’s complex legacy as we read it both in the context of its time and through the lens of Kerouac’s own background as a first-generation American born of French-Canadian parents.

Read Ulysses with one of the leading James Joyce scholars in an intimate in-person setting at the Rosenbach. One of the challenges of reading Ulysses on one’s own is that we tend to see (or object to not seeing!) what we expect to find. Slow reading in a communal setting allows readers to access the unexpected, the incomprehensible, the bizarre complexity of daily life.  

Dive into that material history with this hands-on class, which will cover the foundations of letterpress, from setting metal type to pulling prints. Participants will craft a collaborative and seasonally appropriate chapbook of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry on an iron handpress.

This hands-on class invites participants to explore how individuals folded letters to function as their own creative, and occasionally top-secret, enclosures before (and after) the invention of the envelope in 1830. Use paper, wax, scissors, and seals to reconstruct several historical letterlocking formats found in the Rosenbach’s collection while discussing the relative security, innovation, and elegance of each model. 

In celebration of Mexican Independence Day, join us for a yoga experience inspired by the visionary work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the 17th-century Mexican poet, philosopher, and nun who defied convention to pursue a life of intellectual and spiritual inquiry. 

In this class, participants will join that sustainable tradition, recycling vegetable cartons into one-of-a-kind blank books inspired by Anne Goy’s crisscross binding! Along the way, this workshop teaches broadly useful bookbinding skills, including how to prepare a text block and fundamental sewing techniques.

In this hands-on printing workshop, you will use a 19th century iron handpress to create your own, personal copies of U.S. founding documents–such as Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. The workshop will be accompanied by a discussion of how print culture has served as a tool of change and given voice to the people, with examples from the Rosenbach collection.

On the 250th anniversary of Girard’s arrival in Philadelphia, join the Rosenbach for an afternoon seminar focused on the Bass Otis portrait and the story of Girard’s decision to cast his lot with the young American republic.

This four-session class will cover the foundations of letterpress, from setting metal type to pulling prints. Learn about the history of printing through exploring an extraordinary publication: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.  

Make your own portrait miniature in this in-person workshop. Bring a small photo or print of a favorite image (up to about 4”x5”), and John Wind will provide all the other supplies needed to embellish and frame the image in a meaningful and personal way.  

This five-week course offers an in-depth exploration of Anne Brontë’s life and works. The youngest of the Brontës, Anne is sometimes overshadowed by her elder sisters, whose works have achieved greater prominence in literature and culture. Yet Anne’s writing is no less powerful or profound, offering a unique voice unafraid to confront and represent the darker, more uncomfortable aspects of 19th-century culture. Through close reading, discussion, and consideration of the historical context of her two published novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), this course will explore what Anne had to say about morality, gender, class, religion and the struggle for independence. We will give particular attention to how and why Anne wanted to interrogate and challenge Victorian social conventions with clarity and courage.  

Our course will take place across six sessions, with one week between each meeting.

We’ll examine how William Davenant’s departures from (and additions to) Shakespeare’s original text transformed the tragedy for new audiences—and what these changes reveal about the play’s afterlife. 

Jewish activism before and during the American Revolution helped set the stage for the new United States’ Constitution. Paul Finkelman will discuss this important history of Jewish participation in the American Revolution. 

Let’s bring back the Medieval trend of wearing books as fashion accessories! In this hands-on bookbinding class, you will craft a belt book inspired by the Rosenbach’s 1364 illuminated almanac [MS 1004/29], which is also known as a “bat book.” 

In this five-session course, we will uncover some of the medieval influences upon Eliot’s most famous work, including selections from The Wasteland, Four Quartets, and Murder in the Cathedral. Along the way, we’ll investigate how and where he draws upon the Arthurian Grail cycle, Christian mysticism, and The Canterbury Tales.

The apparent simplicity of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is deceptive—beneath her brief, direct language lies profound depths of emotion and insight. In this three-part yoga series, we’ll explore her life and work through movement, breath, and reflection.

Session 3: Wonder & Interconnection 

Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on Horacio Quiroga—who adapted Poe’s gothic intensity and psychological suspense to the jungles and borderlands of the River Plate and Misiones—this course traces the evolution of the contemporary Latin American short story in English translation. We’ll read pivotal writers—Borges, Rulfo, Fuentes, García Márquez—and spotlight the vital contributions of women writers, including Rosario Ferré and Mariana Enríquez.