All Program Dates
January 21, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
February 4, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
February 18, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
March 4, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
March 18, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm ET
Registration
Tuition for this course is $275. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email rsvp@rosenbach.org.
This program is for those 18 and older.
Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, November 14, for Rosenbach members on Friday, November 21, and for the general public on Wednesday, November 26.
Description
In the years between the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851 and The Confidence-man in 1857, the final work of prose he would publish in his lifetime, Herman Melville wrote some of his most enduring pieces of short fiction and searing portraits of America in its first 80 years. In this five-session course, we will do a deep dive into Melville’s writings from the 1850s, reading three of his serialized magazine pieces–Bartleby, the Scrivener; Israel Potter; and Benito Cereno–and tackling his most experimental novel, The Confidence-man. Across these works, Melville grappled with the founding and foundering of the American experiment, re-examining the national attachment to the Revolution in Israel Potter, the expansion of slavery and empire in Benito Cereno, and the emergence of finance capitalism in Bartleby and The Confidence-man.
As Melville moved between historical fictions of the late-18th century and portraits of America in the 1850s, he fictionalized figures like Benjamin Franklin, rewrote the memoirs of sea captains and frontier lawmen, and captured with brutal precision and irony, elements of the American character that endure to this day. In the first three sessions of this course, we will cover one short work per week, reserving the last two sessions for the raucous satire of The Confidence-man, which Philip Roth described in 2016 as “the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel” that speaks most directly to America today.
Sponsors
The Rosenbach’s Melville’s America with Jennifer Greiman program is sponsored by Jacqueline and Eric Kraeutler.
Instructor
Jennifer Greiman is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University. She is a scholar of 19th-century American literature and democracy and the author of Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form (Stanford University Press, 2023) and Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (Fordham University Press, 2010). She is also the co-editor, with Michael Jonik, of The Oxford Handbook of Herman Melville (2025). She has been associate editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies for six years and will become editor of the journal in 2026.