All Program Dates
August 12, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
August 26, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
September 9, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
September 23, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
October 7, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
October 21, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
November 4, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
November 18, 2026 | 6:00pm - 7:30pm
Registration
Tuition for this course is $480. 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.
To promote access to onsite and virtual Rosenbach experiences, we offer scholarships for each Signature Program. To inquire, email Sunstein Senior Manager of Digital Initiatives Edward G. Pettit at epettit@rosenbach.org.
Description
In 1952, the cultural critic C.L.R. James wrote, “the miracle of Herman Melville is this: that 100 years ago… he painted a picture of the world in which we live which is to this day unsurpassed.” Nearly 75 years after James’s own book, his claims for Melville’s Moby-Dick as a portrait of our world still resonate. From its study of a charismatic authoritarian to its minute account of a global oil economy to the obsessive attention that it pays to the bodies and lives of whales, squid, and other denizens of the sea, Moby-Dick continues to feel very present and very urgent. In the eight sessions of this course, we will take up a slow and close reading of Melville’s monumental novel, taking our time to consider the work in its grandest visions, its most minute observations, and the overall joy with which it attends to –-and attaches us to–-the stuff of life and the world. Each week, we’ll follow Melville down the rabbit holes of his own obsessions and references and also take a look at the work that later artists and writers have made from the vast material that this book offers. Throughout the course, we will draw on the Rosenbach’s phenomenal holdings to enrich our conversations about Melville’s work.
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 is the editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
Sponsors
This course is generously sponsored by Patricia LePera and Arnold Lurie.